March 29, 2024

Times Apps Pay Model to Change

On June 27, the company will start charging nonsubscribers who want to read more than three articles a day on The New York Times apps for mobile devices. Until now, readers using the apps were able to have access to 10 to 15 articles a day exclusively from its Top News section without paying for content.

After clicking through three articles, nonsubscribers will be able to browse section fronts and get article summaries. But they will have to become subscribers to view more than three articles. Subscribers are also able to read more than just the Top News section, with access to articles, blog posts, videos and slide shows from all sections of The Times.

Web subscriptions that include mobile apps range from $15 to $35 every four weeks.

To encourage more readers to pay for the app, the company said it is introducing a seven-day free trial.

Denise F. Warren, an executive vice president of the company, said that The Times had been planning for a long time to charge for content on its apps because readers had access to many more free articles there than they did on the Web site.

“We always knew there was an imbalance,” Ms. Warren said in an interview. “We wanted to restore that balance between the Web site and the apps.”

Since April 2011, when the company introduced a metered pay model on its Web site, The Times and The International Herald Tribune have attracted 676,000 paid digital subscribers. On the Web site, nonsubscribers can have access to 10 free articles a month.

Charging for content has become an important source of revenue for The Times. Last year was the first time that circulation revenue surpassed advertising revenue. Company officials have said the growth in circulation revenue was helped greatly by the demand for digital subscriptions and the rise in print prices. The increasing use of apps and tablets are part of that growth strategy.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 20, 2013

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect price range for Web subscriptions to The New York Times. The range is $15 to $35 every four weeks, not $15 to $20.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/business/media/new-pay-model-for-times-apps.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

A Pearl Buck Novel, New After 4 Decades

The manuscript was stumbled upon in a storage unit in Texas and returned to the Buck family in December in exchange for a small fee, said Jane Friedman, the chief executive of Open Road Integrated Media, the publisher.

Buck, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, is believed to have completed the manuscript for the book, “The Eternal Wonder,” shortly before she died of cancer in 1973, said her son Edgar S. Walsh, who manages her literary estate.

The novel is one of dozens that the prolific Buck completed during her lifetime, a tumultuous eight decades that took her as a young child from her birthplace, Hillsboro, W.Va., to China, where her father worked as a Presbyterian missionary. While in her late 30s, she wrote “The Good Earth,” her second and most famous novel, a compassionate portrait of Chinese farmers that was published in 1931 and became the biggest-selling novel in the United States for two successive years.

After Buck returned to the United States, she continued to write both fiction and nonfiction until the end of her life, churning out material at a pace that prompted the writer John Hersey to remark that she had produced “probably 70 too many” books. (Open Road estimates that she wrote about 100 books, including fiction, nonfiction and commentary.)

Oprah Winfrey revived the Buck canon by choosing “The Good Earth” as one of her book club selections in 2004. Now the publisher of Buck’s digital backlist, Open Road is trying to move her work into wider circulation again. Last year it announced that 13 of Buck’s novels, including “The Good Earth,” “The Promise” and “A House Divided,” would be released as e-books for the first time in an effort to reach an audience beyond print readers.

The recently discovered book was described by the publisher as “the coming-of-age story of Randolph Colfax, an extraordinarily gifted young man whose search for meaning and purpose leads him to New York, England, Paris and on a mission patrolling the DMZ in Korea that will change his life forever — and, ultimately, to love.”

Ms. Friedman, a former chief executive of HarperCollins, founded Open Road in 2009. “All of the themes that were important to Pearl Buck are in this book,” she said. “The main character, the love, the attention to detail of the Chinese artifacts, the relationship this young man has. She writes in a way that is absolutely hypnotic.”

Mr. Walsh said that his mother spent her last four years in Vermont, and when she died, her estate was in disarray.

How two copies of the book, a typed version and a photocopied manuscript in Buck’s handwriting, made it to Texas, he said, remains a mystery to the family.

“After my mother died in Vermont, her personal possessions were not carefully controlled,” he said. “The family didn’t have access. Various things were stolen. Somebody in Vermont ran off with this thing, and it eventually ended up in Texas.”

Peter Conn, a professor of English and education at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote “Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography,” said that of Buck’s contributions, she most notably commanded the imagination of American readers with her descriptions of China.

“Pearl Buck strongly shaped Western and specifically American perceptions of China to an extent that had not been seen in the past,” he said. “She actually can make claim to a unique kind of cultural achievement, which is to prepare Americans for the increasingly tangled relationship we were going to have with China for the next 70 or 80 years.”

Mr. Conn said that Buck’s work began to drop off in quality during the 1940s, and that the books that came afterward were not “consistently as interesting, with a few exceptions.”

The Nobel Prize in Literature, which is awarded for a body of work, cited Buck’s “rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China” and her “biographical masterpieces.” She wrote two biographies of her parents, members of the Southern Presbyterian Mission who were ardently devoted to their work.

Although Mr. Conn has not yet read “The Eternal Wonder,” being released on Oct. 22 in paperback and e-book formats, he said he was intrigued to hear that it was set partly in Korea, where Buck did much of her work.

“There are probably passages of interest,” he said. “She’s an extraordinary woman who led an incomparably fascinating life.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/business/media/a-pearl-buck-novel-new-after-4-decades.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Gannett Posts Lower Income but Higher Revenue

The media company, which operates the nation’s largest newspaper chain, said it earned $103.1 million, or 44 cents a share, in the October-December period. That was down from $116.9 million, or 49 cents a share, a year earlier.

Revenue grew to $1.52 billion from $1.39 billion.

Adjusted earnings were $207.3 million, or 89 cents a share, in the latest quarter. The figures exclude one-time charges related to the elimination of jobs, a consolidation of facilities and other items. A year ago, Gannett’s adjusted earnings were 72 cents a share.

Analysts, on average, were expecting earnings of 88 cents a share on revenue of $1.5 billion, according to a poll by FactSet.

Gannett owns USA Today and 81 other newspapers, 23 television stations and several digital businesses.

Companywide digital revenue increased 29 percent and accounted for a quarter of all revenue, Gannett said.

Gannett began charging newspaper readers for online access last year, erecting so-called paywalls at most of its newspapers. At the same time, the company raised prices of single-copy newspapers and print subscriptions.

Gannett said the newspaper division had revenue of $1.04 billion, up 4 percent from $1 billion last year. Circulation revenue grew 17 percent to $313 .1 million from $268.1 million. Advertising revenue fell 2 percent to $657.5 million from $670.7 million.

Broadcasting revenue soared 44 percent to $287.5 million from $199.8 million, helped by political advertising.

Gannett warned that its TV advertising revenue would be hurt this quarter by the absence of political ads and the Super Bowl’s move from NBC to CBS.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/business/media/gannett-posts-lower-income-but-higher-revenue.html?partner=rss&emc=rss