There are two interesting things about the new New York Times Reader application. First, the company has abandoned SilverLight for Adobe Air, thereby ensuring cross-platform compatibility without that nasty Microsoft aftertaste. Second, the application is great.
Full disclosure: I’m a regular contributor to the NYT but I’m not employed by them full-time and act as a freelancer. But I still read the paper every day.
Now, for the good stuff. I used the earlier app briefly and put it away. I find that this new version is much cleaner than the earlier iteration. The front page is extremely readable and sections are clearly laid out. The application stores up to seven days of content and includes the crosswords as well as much of the standard print layout. You can’t do a full, site-wide search through the app simply because that data isn’t there. However, you can read the paper on a laptop.
There is a bit of lag in the Air app under OS X and I’m not sure if it’s buffering or there are other issues with the UI.
But is this the proverbial straw that broke the even-toed ungulates’ back? I’ve been toying with the idea of canceling my paper subscription for years now but there is something in me that thinks I won’t get the news if I don’t have it arrayed on the surface made of fibrous material. I like moving from page to page, scanning the interesting articles, and ignoring the rest. I can get that job done over breakfast.
However, when I was traveling my NYT couldn’t come with me. I would suspend delivery and never read a word of the paper. Now, with this app, the NYT is not longer a physical thing. But it’s not as simple, I think, as digitizing the times. I originally thought the Kindle would be the answer to my prayers but again, I haven’t found a good analog for the newsprint experience. This – and potentially the DX – might finally relegate the print edition to the obsolete folder in my head.
A few strange behaviors I noticed included the occasional disappearance of the front page images as well as a problem with in-book images, like this image-less obituary. Articles from a few days ago had their images intact.
This is, however, the way to go. The service costs $14.95 a month. Paper service costs about $40 a month in Brooklyn, a considerable cost savings. I suspect using this service will be a lateral move for me – just as it will be for many print hounds. After using the Reader and reading the paper for a while, the paper version will become little more than a vestigial tail. While part of me is sad – I’ll miss the paper – the rest of me knows this is the only way to keep this crazy thing we call journalism alive.
Photo Gallery by Picturesurf
I’m just wondering myself here: why not just use the website instead?
Is there a difference in content and/or experience?
Agreed, I see no reason to pay $15/month for this when all of the content is available for free on the website. The app is also running slower than an nytimes webpage
It’s indeed a very well designed reader. I love the layout and clean feel. At nearly 1/3 of the price of the printed paper it sounds like a great offer. I won’t be signing up anytime soon but I imaging die hard NYT readers will welcome this.
The Times Reader app is really well done.
Just to get the facts straight though, the first version of the app was built on top of WPF (currently Windows only) which is a different technology than Silverlight (cross-platform):
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/NYTimesReaderWPFsFirstKillerApp.aspx
–Daniel
Anti Microsoft bias + NYT contributor = post not worth it’s weight in advertising
Ugh, AIR just seems janky on every platform. Did the previous Times app not work with the silverlight/moonlight runtimes on Mac/Linux or something?
Ah, I see, the article was just wrong. :)
It was cross platform on Silverlight as well, true. But it’s the microsoft aftertaste…
What’s the Microsoft aftertaste?
I thought journalist try to keep personal opinion out of their writing.
Microsoft aftertaste… not sure I see the technical aspects of that, or is this just an emotional gut response?
Did it slow down your computer? Did it perform poorly? Did it crash constantly? As a tech-based blog I’m curious what the technical reasons are that you didn’t like the WPF-based version.
John Biggs is not a journalist.
Pathetic!
Do some research, the first version was based on WPF NOT Siverlight.
Here is your search hot shot
Silverlight (codenamed WPF/E) is a cross-browser browser plugin which contains WPF-based technology (including XAML)[17] that provides features such as video, vector graphics, and animations to multiple operating systems including Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Mac OS X, with Microsoft sanctioned 3rd party developers working on ports for Linux distributions.[18] Specifically, it is currently provided as an add-on for Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer 6 and above, Google Chrome and Apple Safari. Silverlight and WPF only share the XAML presentation layer.
WPF is not necessarily Silverlight. WPF WPF/E
http://silverlight.net/blogs/jesseliberty/archive/2008/03/22/will-silverlight-controls-become-more-wpf-like-a-personal-opinion.aspx
“Silverlight and WPF only share the XAML presentation layer”
This is not true. Silverlight is a browser app (for now) and is a xaml as well as a .net framework subset of WPF. They also share the CLR
“Hot Shot”
You have to be dumb to say that the first version was based on silverlight. LOL
Nice one! Go collect your cheque from Microsoft astroturf boy.
z
John Biggs need no research. As long as it’s Microsoft, it’s not good.
Besides, he’s too busy bending over for Apple to do research.
So true.
How is this superior to reading stories on a web browser? Oh, because you have to subscribe to it. It’s the extra COST that makes it better. I guess the only thing you could say is that dinosaurs who like the way stories are laid out on paper with multiple columns that have to be navigated and, perhaps scrolled to, on a computer screen. I especially like all the wasted white space on the obit demo page.
Completely inferior to the way I currently read Times articles — for free on Firefox.
Print dinosaur reporters/editors/publishers, this will NOT save you and your buggy whip business model.
Bill
According to John Biggs, it’s superior because it’s not Microsoft.
Neither is Firefox. And, it’s free. I could understand if maybe they sold you the app and then you could use it to get stories for free from the website, but paying for a subscription? These guys are nuts.
There’s probably a browser extension you could build that would do all the crappy paper-style formatting that these guys want and still be able to search and load stories from the paper’s online archives. And still be free.
Interesting of the NYT to try and develop a new system for reading content from its newspapers. But creating a browser extension? that’s a result of too many people with too much time on their hands!
Kindle, anybody?
Third sentence should read:
I guess the only thing you could say in its defense is that dinosaurs who like the way stories are laid out on paper with multiple columns that have to be navigated to can enjoy scrolling around in what they can pretend is something made of paper.
Newsflash to Bill –> Free isn’t a business model.
Kudos to NYT for trying something new.
I agree that free is not *necessarily* a business model, I still have no idea why someone would pay for this if they can get all the news for free on the web.
I’m not being sarcastic – I feel like I am missing something.
“Completely inferior”… you’re a total retard if you honestly think that.
“…that apps offer the potential to improve user experiences in any setting – mobile or desktop – and modern, evolved IDE’s reduce the cost of development. Expect more organizations to recognize this, and apps to proliferate.”
How about it? Anyone else think that the proliferation of “apps” means the beginning of the end of the browser as a UI paradigm?
Looks like like a cool app but…
We have to pay $3.45/week for the honor of using it in an AIR app versus getting it on the Web site for free? Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
That’s kind of my issue with it as well. This does clean up the screen and a lot of folks didn’t like reading it on the website. I really don’t know the way to go here.
That said, the one huge plus is that this caches the entire weeks papers so you can read it offline.
John – the second point is really a big value add. I’m finally seeing at least some reason to pay – although I don’t think its enough.
If you want to read a weekly omnibus edition of the newspaper, would you pay a small fee to receive an Acrobat PDF document of content from the papers, especially the op-ed pages, columnists and articles, maybe not but if I was interested, think I would pay for daily content…
Aside from the business aspects, there’s some significant technology innovations in this new project too… the Adobe InDesign and Core Technology teams have brought the print world’s requirements for typography and layout into the web browser, through the new Text Layout Framework in Adobe Flash Player and AIR.
More info:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/textlayout/
http://www.insideria.com/2009/03/flash-text-engine.html
https://xd.adobe.com/
Big things are starting to happen…. :)
jd/adobe
Why? This is the best one yet: http://www.acrylicapps.com/times/
I am not sure I get it either. It looks similar to the website and the website is free?
What exactly are you getting for $14.95 a month that we don’t get for free on NyTimes.com? BTW, the Times Reader homepage doesn’t really say what the benefits are other then “it’s a differnt way to read the NyTimes”.
Must be the crosswords that make it worth the $. They’re the only thing different I can see.
This article is garbage! It’s loaded with wierd insinuations. Give us the facts, not a smattering of your opinions!
This could be preparatory work for eReaders. It might make sense to have a well written & laid out newspaper for them. Possibly even worth the subscription fee, if it is automatically downloaded & ready to read every morning.
Adobe Inspire has some nice behind the scenes stuff on the app. https://xd.adobe.com/#/home
Nice video interview with a couple of the developers: https://xd.adobe.com/#/featured/video/200
Andrew -> I should have said, “it’s competely inferior for my needs.” I like pretty text, I love nice typesetting. I Iike fins on cars, too, but I drive a finless Toyota. The layout and appearance of text is less important to me than the functionality of text web pages. The text can be formatted how I want it; I can copy bits of it into an email; I can have a program like Festival read the text out loud to me; I can look at it on a tiny screen and have it all in one column; and, furthermore, I can read it for free all day long.
Devil’s advocate -> The only business model I’m interested in is free. Any text-based media company who has other ideas can see my comment above — i.e, your content will be free anyway. A business model that makes the Times more money than they get from ads is not a benefit to us, so unless you or a family members works in the dying journalism industry, why do you care?
John Dowdell -> One of the great things about plain text on web pages is you don’t need to install another app to read them. I followed your links and the text is really beautiful. However, one of the links was inaccessible — I needed to upgrade my Adobe flash player. That sums up another problem I have with the whole idea of a dedicated, closed source reader: you lose control over and access to the content.
I remember when the Times had a premium subscription for parts of their page. Complete failure — they ended that a while back. I didn’t need it anyway because people would post snippets and commentary about the subscription-only columns on the other sites I read, so I got what I needed, for free.
This new TimesReader won’t end the free ride, either — someone can take a screenshot and scan the pretty text with OCR and publish it as REAL text, which I will then read. More likely, though, I’ll go elsewhere for the news, and read the secondhand reporting of any stories broken by the Times anyway, for free.
Rod Edwards -> You hit the nail on the head: the movement to apps is a move away from the browser UI as a content delivery system and that’s what I hate most about TimesReader, what makes it completely inferior for my needs. The web is a really cool way of distributing and receiving content. Do we really want to have to get a dedicated application to get text from every newspaper in the country? What is this, cable TV with a different converter box for each channel? I think the papers wish they could do this, but the bottom line is, I think, that if they tried to move to this sort of system exclusively, they would lose readers (and ad-reading eyeballs) and people would go somewhere else. That could create a downward spiral for the internet division and you’d see the website back up again, bristling with ads. (I don’t see ads myself — another great benefit of web-delivered content is that I can use Adblock — but I understand that there are some people still see them.)
Let me make this clear — I LOVE good typesetting. Now what we need is a browser (or extension) that would make typesetting and layout look better, perhaps using publisher-created markup or stylesheets. That way, we, the readers, can still control the content once we get it, but our browser can listen to the sage advice of the Times layout and typesetting folks and create nicer looking pages for all the different screen shapes and resolutions out there.
This is nice. Now wouldn’t it be nice if they fixed their iPhone app so that it stops hanging up?!!
What’s wrong with using trees for paper?
Trees are great recyclable and renewable resource.
When managed properly (which you may not believe, but it usually is) has little environmental impact.
Yes but you see, we have these “applications” called “web browsers.”
dude, you sound like a nitwit, “has abandoned SilverLight for Adobe Air, thereby ensuring cross-platform compatibility without that nasty Microsoft aftertaste”
…in order to get netflix to run on mac and guarantee cross-platform compatibility, the mother of intensive streaming apps uses silverlight – seriously, go ask some apple devs which they prefer and i believe that you’ll be surprised…
@Bill Yes, you’re absolutely right on part of that, that new clientside capabilities do require new code working on all those machines. Doesn’t matter if it’s a browser plugin, a browser, or an operating system.
re: “John Dowdell -> One of the great things about plain text on web pages is you don’t need to install another app to read them. I followed your links and the text is really beautiful. However, one of the links was inaccessible — I needed to upgrade my Adobe flash player. That sums up another problem I have with the whole idea of a dedicated, closed source reader: you lose control over and access to the content.”
True on the first part — improving the abilities of running your app on each machine out there in the world requires some type of update to those machines. Adobe Flash Player 10 was released Oct 2008, and by March was at 75% consumer support, should be about 90% by now. It’s the invisible ability uniting all computers.
But on your closing point, don’t feel bad about being prohibited from seeing a feature in the new Player just because you were using an old Player. Works the same with browsers — new types of capabilities require new installations.
More people use Flash than any particular browser brand. They update it more quickly than their browsers or operating systems too. As a developer, you’ll get it fastest with Flash.
jd/adobe
I don’t have Flash 10 on this machine. If it were a Firefox browser EXTENSION, it would have already been upgraded. What I really need to do is upgrade the browser — it’s painfully old. In general, I have trouble with the Flash philosophy of running content as compiled code when it doesn’t have to be — one ould use Javasript or some other language/container/format. I prefer to have control over and the capacity to inspect the code, not just get some random binary from people we’re supposed to trust. But that’s me:) No offense to Adobe — they’ve made some great stuff.
It still doesn’t solve newspapers’ biggest issue- paying for their content is the wrong strategy. Shirky was right….
http://pravdam.com/2009/05/11/new-york-times-releases-an-amazing-new-application-misses-the-point/
The only thing you need to be paying for, is stuff you buy for yourself or love ones….. I wouldn’t pay for the News and certainly not the NY Times….. I had to laugh at this from there download page, i quote: world’s greatest journalism should i throw up now.
I spent three or four hours with this app this evening:
Pro’s:
o Captures the sense of the entire newspaper. You have a gut sense of what you have and have not read and what’s left to be reviewed.
o Seven Days of articles offline – great for carrying with you in your Netbook.
o Awesome Keyboard Navigation
o Gets away from offering free content via the Web. Content Provider need to realize that if they keep providing their incredibly expensive content for free, people won’t pay for it elsewhere – just look at all the people above who whine “I can get it free on nyt.com, why should I pay for it anywhere else”.
(sidenote: NYT != Wikipedia. Anybody can write and edit a encyclopedia article on their pet topic. Actual reporting in the field has always required trained professionals. And no, blogging != Reporting. The sooner the Major content providers start charging and controlling their content, the more quickly they’ll gain control over their destiny.)
Cons:
o Doesn’t include Diagrams, Charts, or figures. Ouch. They’ll need that, particularly for the business stories.
I encourage those commenting that are trying to figure out what makes reading the NYT in this application better than reading it on the web site to download the application and try it. Their is no cost or registration required to download the app and try it. You get the front page, business section, crossword and news in video for free. We hope that you find reading the news through the reader a more engaging experience.
For some, the benefits outlined above will be worth the subscription price, for others it won’t. In either case we welcome any and all feedback on the application.
John/Adobe
Someone said “free is not a business model.” Another person said they are only interested in free.
It’s true that free paper’s that rely on advertising for revenue cannot charge readers for their content. However, those that have relied on the advertising and subscription model will find new innovative ways to monetize services.
What I don’t understand is why many people think they’re entitled. And if you find value in the information you read then why wouldn’t you support the writers for their hard work.
I’ll be the first to say that journalism is not dead. And it never will be. As the flow of information evolves journalists will become more entrepreneurial. Journalism will evolve in many different forms, which we’ve seen already with blogs.
Speaking of blogs, many people subscribe to hundreds of blogs. Many of which aggregate the same content and then link right back to the originating article. And seriously, a blogger who copies and pastes an article to their blog is not a journalist. They’re a thief.
This is not to say there aren’t very valuable blogs with original content out there. My point is that there are very few when scaled with the amount of blogs available.
I think what the NYT did with Reader 2.0 is innovative. Many people have to remember that news organizations, especially newspapers pay big bucks for surveys and research to provide an accurate picture of their readership. With that information comes products like Reader 2.0.
I for one enjoy reading newspapers. Do I subscribe to any of them? No. Why? Because I can read them for free online. However, If my local daily offered something like the Times Reader 2.0 I’d subscribe. And I will probably keep my monthly subscription to the NYTimes’ Reader because I value their product and the work of their writers.
Lastly, I asked this before and I’ll ask it again: Why do people feel like they’re entitled?
@Marc: “Why do people feel like they’re entitled”: I think it is because so much of the internet is “Free”, and that because they _can_ get so much content for free from both illegal sources such as torrents, usenet, mp3.com and from advertising based sources (nytimes.com, a good chunk of wsj.com) that they recoil when they see situations in which they have to pay.
I have around 20 Blogs/Websites in my daily crawl through the web, but 19 of them (techcrunch, alleyinsider, huffingtonpost, ycombinator, even Salon) _pale_ in comparison to the content that a single day of Times Reader provides. Sometimes even a _single_ well reported and written story outweighs the value of everything in every other blog I’ll come across.
I think long term the content of the major news sources will slowly return to a subscription model, and when that happens, a lot of the aggregators out there will slowly start to drop off – their value, to a great degree today, comes from leaching off of, or commenting on, the value created by the primary sources.
Some models make more sense free (Google, Wikipedia, craigslist, almost every-non-financial blog in existence) and some make almost no sense for free (NYT, WSJ)
I think you’re dead wrong. Craigslist, which you list as something that makes sense to do for free, gutted the newspapers of their classifieds. More to come like that for the newsrooms.
Here’s my nightmare scenario for the Sulzbergers: news organizations will adjust to the realities of web publication and learn to live within their mean using ad revenue for their funding. What will papers look like? No physical plant, few full-time staff, bloggers will cover local news, as some are doing now.
These new news organizations will be run by the bloggers that rise to the fore in each area of expertise — technology, foreign policy, and so on. These expert bloggers will become the sources for news in their areas. They will provide leadership to some small portion of the soon-to-be-unemployed mass of journalists (and stringers abroad) who can do the legwork for pennies on the dollar compared to the care and feeding of a traditional stable of hacks. The experts and the communities they cultivate will write the stories and engage in thoughful discussions of them, some of which you and I might want to participate in.
What about commentary? Hot air is free — no legwork needed.
Did I miss anything?
It’s not me who’s pushing journalism to be free as in “free beer” — it’s the market. In the good old days of journalism and publishing, there were huge barrier to enter the market — you needed presses and paper and ink. Now, it’s essentially free. The barriers have been removed and commentary and reporting flows freely.
I’m going to play devil’s advocate here, again. My experience of professional reporting in recent years has been that it is generally of poor quality and that reporters, even at the Geriatric Grey Lady, tend toward the hack end of the spectrum.
Take technology reporting. A story from the traditional media will get introduced and linked to in a post on slashdot.org. Within minutes, generally, highly knowledgeable folks will provide thoughful and informative commentary which I often find FAR superior to the reporting in the original story.
How does this happen? Community — slashdot has built a community where ordinary folks and experts come for information, and also come to contribute to the community’s understanding of it. The people who provide the most salient comments clearly have expertise that no reporter could get, simply because they spend their time working in the field that the story discusses, not doing reporting.
I have also found the traditional media company’s coverage of vital matters of state, government and international affairs to be generally rather poor. I don’t want to go into partisan politics here, but most people can agree that there were serious failures of the US press in its coverage of the runup to the Iraq War. Yet, we have outstanding analyis, commentary, and even some reporting from bloggers on such matters. Matt Drudge is always dragged out, but what about fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver’s outstanding site analyzing political polling data? I think we’ll see more of these sorts of sites that become the gold standard in a particular area of expertise, rather than sprawling beaurocracies like the traditional media companies that cover everything, but nothing well.
I would like to turn the statement around — why do newspapers and traditional media feel entitled to wall off and charge extra for content they’re already getting ad revenue from? Sounds like a personal problem, or, more likely, a personnel problem (sorry, bad pun). They’re too big. They need to get bloggers who live in other parts of the world to contribute stories on hurricanes and floods, rather than financing travel and upkeep for a bunch of surly hacks with a misplaced sense of entitlement to their jobs, and, let’s not deny it, the special place they used to have as chroniclers of our time.
The market has spoken: free is always better than $15 per month.
@Bill – Technology reporting isn’t really reporting most of the time, so much as it is hobbyist/fan writing. There are a lot of areas that I won’t be concerned about if they disappear from newspapers – There are lots of alternative for technology writing, fan writing (completely missing from newspapers anyways), TV reporting, and a broad array of topics. Blogs like TechCrunch, AlleyInsider, appleinsider, cnet, networkworld all do as good a job, if not better, than the traditional journalists. As much as I love Walt Mossberg and David Pogue, and respect their writing – it wouldn’t be the end of the world if the baton was handed over to the bloggers in their respective areas.
Keep in mind that what you are getting on Slashdot/Digg/YCombinator/Reddit isn’t reporting, btw, but commentary. There is a reason why there is almost _no_ original journalism on those aggregation sites (Possible exception being PG’s essays on ycombinator) – It’s hard work. Harping away (as we are here) is easy in comparison.
I’ll agree that NYT screwed up in the runup to the Iraq War. Absolutely horrible, and a blemish on their record which will take decades (if they last that long) to recover from; particularly as their major writers were acting as little more than propaganda arms for the administration.
FiveThirtyEight outperformed most of the major traditional outlets in Election Commentary, but, once again – commentary, not really original journalism for the most part (there were exceptions – and I expect to see more awesome work from FiveThirtyEight in the future)
As to why newspapers need to wall off content – pretty much for the same reason why Apple feels the need to charge for its computers – the product is high quality, and requires a lot of work to create. Advertising revenue off the Web doesn’t come close to covering the costs of highly skilled journalists who may need to work full time for the better part of two weeks, traveling all over the world, to get the story. Find me a blogger willing to do that.
The market has spoken in that free is more successful than $15/month – I’m not sure about better.
I agree with your statement about distributing/delegating the effort on reporting on stories – It may be that we see a hybrid approach in the future – trusted editorial bodies like Wikipedia (Much of the value in Wikipedia comes from a core body of about 1500 administrators who keep the vandalism under control and the standards such as NPOV in the forefront) and some yet-to-be-created journalism outlet that manages to channel citizen journalists from around the world into some comprehensible format.
I’ve spent four hours today reading the NYT, as I do on most Saturday/Sundays- and I don’t think there are any non-traditional sources that can compare with it. Yet.
Gordo -> Here’s the blogged text of a speech that does a much better job than I did explaining how the best of tech and political blogs could be models for the future of reporting news on the web:
http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2009/03/the-following-is-a-speech-i-gave-yesterday-at-the-south-by-southwest-interactive-festival-in-austiniif-you-happened-to-being.html
I especially like his discussions of neighborhood blogging in New York City and the future of investigative journalism, and his insight that we’re living in a thriving rain forest of news on the web, when 20 years ago we were confined to a desert.
One of the things I really wish newspapers could do right online would be to develop communities of readers and writers who can provide insights and — frankly — corrections right on the same pages as their stories. While you’re right, many of the links on sites like Slashdot are links to media stories, the value of that community and their input is what makes going there worth it to me. Newspapers don’t generally do this, in part because IMHO it undermines their authority as lords of the news. I would much rather have a correction posted in an up-moderated comment below the story that to have to wait and hope the reporter or editor will provide one in response to an email.
Another pet peeve of mine is newspapers who don’t link to relevant content or referenced sites in the stories they publish on the web. I don’t know the philosophy behind this, but it may be something to do with either not wanting to drive traffic away from their own site. It’s just annoying, though.
Defining tech news as not really news anyway is a nice trick, just like saying classifieds weren’t really ads and naturally Craigslist can do those better. Start down that road and you can slowly write off each news subject as journalists move their operations to web, something papers should be careful not to do. Stephen Berlin Johnson says in the linked-to speech, technology news is so well covered by the web because web coverage of it has been around so long. Early adopters of the web were interested in tech news. Slashdot actually has a premium membership, BTW, that gives access to posts sooner — a potential way for papers to make money from their content.
Gordo -> I lost a reply in the works — damn tubes! What I said was check out the text of a speech by Steven Berlin Johnson, it provides a much more developed argument for looking to tech and political blogging as the future of journalism in all areas:
http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2009/03/the-following-is-a-speech-i-gave-yesterday-at-the-south-by-southwest-interactive-festival-in-austiniif-you-happened-to-being.html
His discussions of local reporting and the potential future of investigative journalism are quite insightful. He argues that tech folks were early adopters of the web, so tech news is the most mature example of web journalism we have. Johnson says all news will be covered this way in the future, and I tend to agree. (Also, here is a Guardian commentator who discusses the Johnson’s speech: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/17/mediabusiness-internet)
There must be something in the air — here’s a piece about the topics we’ve been discussing at DailyKos:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/5/17/732381/-Clinging-to-a-dead-biz-model-for-dear-life
“Craigslist, which you list as something that makes sense to do for free, gutted the newspapers of their classifieds.”
That, to me, is proof that it _does_ make sense to do for free. Pay-for-classifieds don’t make a much sense in the internet era, when distribution (the primary value-add of Classifieds in the pre-internet era) is close to free. Craigslist (like wikipedia) is successful because their model works well.
I sadly agree with everything else you say though, though I’m hoping the NYT and WSJ somehow come up with a model that will save traditional journalism. I’ve spent two+ hours today with the Times Reader ($3.45/week subscription), and really don’t look forward to a day when this excellent journalism (for the most part) falls by the wayside.