I totally get that they’re strapped, but I think this is really bad news.

Rumors suggest that the New York Times is close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, according to a post in NY Mag from earlier this week. Sources for this story are vague and shadowy, but supposedly include people currently employed by the organization and “familiar with internal deliberations” at the New York Times. If this story is true, the only thing close to good news is that word has it they are leaning toward a metered system of subscription where you will be allowed to read a certain number of articles on the New York Times website for free, and then after that number is reached would be asked to subscribe. This is, at the very least, far preferable to the system used by The Wall Street Journal where some content is free but the content that is protected is completely placed behind a wall, and totally unavailable (even and especially to search engines) unless you subscribe.

Sources for the New York Mag post claim that the official plan for the online future of the New York Times will be announced within a few weeks, but that any actual implementation of the policy will take months to enact. There is no official statement confirming or denying these rumors at present, and The Nytpicker demonstrates that most of this information has been reported in various forms from different sources over the past year anyway, so it’s impossible to claim that the New York Times is any closer now than it ever has been to figuring out how best to handle online content.

Whether or not the NY Mag story is legitimate, I am left wondering how this will play out. I am picturing that episode of The Office where there’s a link to the WSJ article about Dunder Mifflin going bankrupt and all the Office staff are standing around wanting to know more about it, but Oscar says they cannot read the whole story because it requires a subscription, and he is waiting for someone to give him the go-ahead to spend company money. In response, Michael says “Wow, $1.99 to read the rest of the story . . .” as if this is an unimaginable request, but that it’s time to move on, which prompts Jim to ask, “Are you serious?!” and put in a code. After all is said and done, Andy makes a point of saying that he’ll pay for the $1.99, but that Jim beat him to it (actual episode embed is above).

The metaphor makes sense to me: the Jims of the world will be willing to subscribe, but only when it’s absolutely necessary, and the Oscars and the Dwights of the world will look over the shoulders of the Jims so they don’t have to pay. The Michaels of the world will assume the content cannot be all that important, or certainly not important enough to justify an expenditure of $1.99, and remain unconcerned. The very concerned people in a particular niche, as well as the always-already-plugged-in consumers will subscribe long term, and everyone else will find something else to read. This would, in effect, mean the newspaper online experience a niche market in the future, which is fine, except they cannot support the infrastructure as it exists at present on that kind of budget. They’d have to be totally reorganized.

Let’s not forget that there are moments when papers of record like the NYT are crucial. Example: Haiti. How are we going to get coverage on Haiti without giant news conglomerates getting involved? Is Boing-Boing going to send out Cory Doctorow to report? What about Arianna Huffington? Will she actually foot the bill for a trip to Haiti, and is her unpaid writing staff up to the job? How good is Dooce ’s photography going to hold up to people getting crushed under a building? Can you Photoshop in doom and destruction? Would she even be willing to do this? It seems clear that with situations like Haiti there’s just not anybody in the blogosphere fully equipped to deal with it: even with the idea of the citizen blogger at work, you cannot really rely on people in the middle of a disaster zone to stop what they’re doing and report for the rest of the world. I mean, is there WiFi in Haiti even under the best of circumstances?

It seems like the only way for the newspapers to survive is to bind together and create something like a global newspaper of record that provides almost all of its content in an online format only, for free, with advertising, and shares its resources throughout the globe. Every individual organization has to be pared down to its bare bones, and companies wanting to advertise will have to do so online. The newspapers need to just take the option of paper advertising out of their hands because, as this recent study of advertising dollar allotment shows, they just don’t seem to be getting it. Companies are still putting tons of money into print media in a totally disproportionate rate to how much they spend for online advertising, even as they lament the fact that the attention and the content has all gone online.

Just for perspective, I asked my Dad what he thought of the whole newspaper thing and what he was going to do about it, because I figured he’d be a good source, what with his love of print media and his general distaste for technology. He said that he had thought about subscribing to the Wall Street Journal, but that they wanted him to sign up for a whole year at a time, and he just couldn’t stomach it, didn’t think he’d use it, so he hadn’t gone for it. And what about The New York Times, what would he do if they charged for content and/or weren’t available in print format anymore? He said, “Well, I might consider subscribing to them if the LA Times stopped publishing or something.” Bottom line: even the old skool print people look to print as a local medium first and foremost — my Dad knows the NYT is a better newspaper than the LA Times, but it doesn’t have his local information, so he won’t be paying for a paper subscription, much less paying to view online content. I just don’t see how this model is going to work.

Last week, I learned about Jane Aldridge (above), an extraordinary young girl from Texas who writes a blog called Sea of Shoes. If you are under 25, or if you are very into fashion, you probably already know all about Jane Aldridge and her recent trip to the Crillon Debutante Ball representing Teen Vogue, or about J. Aldridge for Sea of Shoes, the shoe-design partnership she forged with Urban Outfitters. But on the off-chance you haven’t yet heard of Sea of Shoes, please check it out, because even if you are not particularly into clothes or ogling the trappings of Texan oil wealth, this young girl’s story is extraordinary, both because of her preternatural luck and her curative talent. Her story got me thinking about how what we have to do, in order to be successful in life and in business, is to allow ourselves room to believe in the extraordinary — even (especially?) when it confuses us, or prompts us to doubt. Because there is nothing quite like the dream of the extraordinary in its ability to capture the attention, hearts, and minds of people, regardless of what business you are in — I’ve tried to list reasons for this below.

1. Ordinary People Are Inspired To Do More, Be Better, By Witnessing The Extraordinary.
   For all of our collective cynicism as a society, there is still nothing like an shared moment of witnessing the extraordinary to wake us all up and spur us to action. I was reminded of this last Friday, as the Lakers struggled to maintain a few points of a lead against a decidedly lesser-skilled opponent (the Miami Heat). In the last few minutes of the game, somehow the Heat was ahead, and the Lakers were facing a loss in a game that they should have won. This wasn’t a particularly important game, in the grand scheme of things, for the Lakers but they certainly would prefer to win it.

   Still, somehow — one part luck, one part coaching, one part talent — the Lakers managed to pull out a win against the odds, in the last 5 seconds of the game by pasting together a few good plays and a penultimate game-clenching shot, a three-pointer thrown up by Kobe Bryant, who was balanced on one leg and had two defenders in his face at the time. Kobe Bryant practices shots like this over and over again, and lives for these kinds of moments, but even he is surprised when they actually go in and manage to win a game that should have been lost.



NBA players are notorious for being very blasé about feats of greatness on the basketball court — they see what is greatness by ordinary standards it all the time. But this was different: even for them, this was extraordinary. But their reaction is like they had just won the Championship all over again. Why? Because it’s extraordinary. There is just nothing like like the extraordinary to get people motivated, or get people inspired. People just eat that shit up, even superstars.

2. Extraordinary people need ordinary people to guide them.
   The thing with being an extraordinary person is that you start losing sight of reality, because your reality as an extraordinary person, is just totally different from that of the rest of the world. You start thinking you can do crazy stuff and get away with it. Sometimes you can. But sometimes you need to be smacked back to reality. Again, a reference to the NBA is instructive here.

   

   Even if you are the reigning MVP of the NBA, you want to keep a connection to the real world. You need highly paid ordinary people around you to keep you grounded. You need ordinary people who are not afraid to say, “Hey, hey, LBJ: how many fashion faux-pas you make today?” or “Either a toggle-coat or a letterman’s sweater, LeBron, but not both, and not with your own initials on it.” Or, “How about this time we don’t jump on Oprah’s couch, Tom?” Or “A three-year affair with a cocktail waitress, Tiger? When you have a former Swedish model waiting for you at home?” Extraordinary people need ordinary people around to save them from themselves. And they need to pay those people well for the trouble. Because . . .

3. Extraordinary People And Things Represent The Work-Product Of Many Hands. It is tough to make something or someone extraordinary all by yourself. Figure out how you can contribute to something extraordinary, and you’ll have a job for life. Britney Spears, the person, has assaulted us with her ordinariness for many years now, but before that, when she had handlers and people controlling her public image, we might have been fooled for a while, even if just for a few minutes, that she was something special. And, even now, if you ask a certain subset of younger girls, they’ll tell you that Britney is something special, but only because many many talented people helped to make her so. And those people all found their paths in the construction of something extraordinary.
4. The Need To Believe Is The Most Extraordinary Thing Of All.
   Returning to Jane Aldridge for a moment, shortly after I discovered her blog, I shared it on Twitter. Several people replied because they, too, were amazed by the blog. Inevitably, the topic of authenticity was broached, because as is the case with all things internet, we had a general distrust of all things we could not confirm with absolute certainty based on our own experience. In the process of this discussion, I made the following tweet expressing my skepticism about the possibility of a 16-year-old, even an extraordinary one, using the phrase, “cupidity of my generation”:

   

   I just kept stumbling on that phrase — keep stumbling on it — because for someone so young to use it is foreign to my experience. And even though Jane Aldrdige responded to me on Twitter about the authenticity of her blog, it was one of the more “trollish” responses that made me realize that I had missed the point wholesale.

   

   That the fact that this kind of word usage, or this kind of precociousness, or this kind of wealth being made accessible to someone so young is foreign to my experience is at the essence of what makes this blog extraordinary. If she had not used that word, perhaps I wouldn’t have found the blog so remarkable. And more importantly, it does not matter if it is “true” or not, because it — whatever it is — makes people believe, and that is what is most powerful. Tap into that belief, and you can make something remarkable yourself.