National Geographic

Aspirational magazine publisher Conde Nast has signed the long-awaited deal to assume over one million square feet of office space in One World Trade Center, which when completed will be the tallest skyscraper in the nation.

The lease marked the largest single tenant to be brought into Lower Manhattan in years. The project is being developed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which sold an ownership stake to the Durst Organization. “We hope Condé Nast, at long last united into a single building, will be the catalyst for the rebirth of the downtown area,” Newhouse told a crowd of reporters and elected officials standing in the bare concrete, window-clad floor of the tower — one of the floors being leased by his company.

Such an act takes a major load off the back of the Port Authority, which is seeking to lease up a building that comes with a long list of challenges. One World Trade Center is surely worth far less that it costs to build (the tower was valued last year at $2 billion, while its construction price tag is over $3 billion). It undeniably causes anxiety over future terrorism among potential tenants. At present, there is just one other private tenant, for 190,000 square feet, signed on to the 2.6 million-square-foot building.

Thousands of clackers are surely sobbing in their Times Square cubes. Quick, somebody get three thousand feet of velvet rope to Ground Zero, stat!

Last week New York's most widely-read Spanish-language newspaper, El Diario, published an editorial supporting marriage equality and obliquely criticizing state Sen. Ruben Diaz for his upcoming anti-gay rally. Yesterday Diaz announced that he will be spearheading a boycott of the paper because of their supposedly anti-Christian positions.

The Newspaper, El Diario La Prensa, calls itself “The Champion of the Hispanics.” But you will never read or find a reporter from El Diario La Prensa covering one of the hundreds of events that we Evangelical Christians celebrate throughout the year. They never cover or report news about the Grand Evangelical Children’s Parade that is held every year. They never cover a celebration of Bishops Day or The Day of the Superintendents. They never cover a single Pastors Day of the many that occur throughout the year. They never send a reporter to cover any of the great campaigns of evangelists such as Yiye Avila, Jorge Raschke or many other great evangelists. And they never cover the New York Hispanic Clergy Organization’s Annual Banquet which is held to honor our pastors and leaders. All our activities are geared to help prevent crime in our communities, for example, taking drug addicts, prostitution and criminals off the street, but El Diario La Prensa does not care. But when it comes to an event regarding homosexuals or an event in favor of abortion, even if there are four people attending, El Diario La Prensa highlights these events on its front pages.

According to Diaz, every fifty cents spent to purchase a copy of El Diario is money spent to support abortion and gay marriage.

Beginning March 28th, you'll be allowed to read exactly twenty New York Times articles per month. After that, you've gotta pay.

Once readers click on their 21st article, they will have the option of buying one of three digital news packages — $15 for a month of access to the Web site and a mobile phone app; $20 for Web access and an iPad app; and $35 for an all-access plan. All subscribers who receive the paper through home delivery will have free and unlimited access across all Times digital platforms except, for now, e-readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook. “A few years ago it was almost an article of faith that people would not pay for the content they accessed via the Web,” Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company, said in his annual State of The Times remarks, which were delivered to employees on Thursday morning.

Even the Times itself is unsure if this will work.

The debate consuming the newspaper business now centers on the question that The Times hopes to answer: Can you reverse 15 years of consumer behavior and build a business around online subscriptions? Many believe the answer is no. No American news organization as large as The Times has attempted to put its content behind a pay wall after allowing unrestricted access. The move is being closely watched by anxious publishers, which have warily embraced the Web and struggled with how to turn online journalism into a profitable business.

This raises an interesting dilemma for bloggers, who even if they subscribe, may hesitate to excerpt articles that their readers may not be able to access in full.

UDPATE: Andrew Sullivan notes the exception for stories linked by blogs, which I totally missed.

If I read it correctly, it almost privileges links from blogs and social media against more direct access. Which makes it a gift to the blogosphere. Anyway, that's my first take: and it's one of great relief. We all want to keep the NYT in business (well, almost all of us). But we also don't want to see it disappear behind some Great NewsCorp-Style Paywall. It looks to me as if they have gotten the balance just about right.