This commercial for The New York Times is from 1986. Replace the newspaper that the family is holding with an iPhone and / or Blackberry. Does the newspaper’s value proposition still hold true? What is my incentive now to buy a print subscription? How does The New York Times add to my self actualization?

In 1986 I would read the comics and flip through the entire newspaper “window shopping”. Now I can do this more effectively online. So what ‘need’ is The New York Times now filling and what is the value of that need? Is the it valueless?

Chris Anderson, author of  The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More and Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price, has an excellent article in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal entitled The Economics of Giving It Away. In it he give a great simple example of the economics affecting the pricing power of newspaper content.

Digital goods — from music and video to Wikipedia — can be produced and distributed at virtually no marginal cost, and so, by the laws of economics, price has gone the same way, to $0.00.

If The New York Times had the money, what would their Super Bowl commercial say? Would it say, “Please bail us out. You NEED US!” Has the value proposition changed since 1986?