About a year ago or so, the New York Times came up with a brilliant idea for its online edition: put their most popular columnists behind a wall and charge for access. They called it TimesSelect, which was an unintentionally appropriate name, as it very rapidly became a victim of natural selection. I responded to the Times' policy by doing the most reasonable thing: I stopped reading the NYTimes altogether. Yeah, it was still an important newspaper, but I just didn't bother regularly checking out an online paper that held its own people for ransom. I expected that TimesSelect would prove an embarrassing failure, but no one I know spent more time predicting its demise, or following the course of it, than Slate's Mickey Kaus. Here is Kaus indulging in some well deserved gloating.
Late Hits: Here's NPR's Laura Sydell citing Ken Doctor for the proposition that the cancellation of TimesSelect is a "sign that we have reached a tipping point with online advertising" where charging for content loses you more in ad dollars than it gains in subscription revenue. "Sign"? "Reached"? "Tipping Point?" It's been obvious for years that this was the case. Slate learned this lesson in 1999. ... The NYT is attempting to get away with the Pinch-saving spin that the online environment "changed" in a way that "wasn't anticipated" after TimesSelect was launched. But the failure ot TimesSelect was completely anticipated at the time by many bloggers (e.g., Jay Rosen) notes Rachel Sklar. Alternative, more sophisticated explanation: Pinch is a fool. ... If he declared he was going to fly and jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would it be a "sign" that mankind had reached a "tipping point" at which individuals were unable to fly? ...
The technology of the internet makes it possible to deliver almost any computer file--text, image, sound clip--very cheaply. One consequence of this is that when you try to charge for content, someone else will immediately figure out how to make the same content available for free. That was one of the problems with TimesSelect: anyone who really wanted to read one of the sequestered columnists could find the piece somewhere else. The other problem was that, frankly, the New York Times prized columnists just weren't really that valuable a commodity. I am willing to pay $10 bucks a month to get thirty downloads of classical jazz that I can listen to over and over, but I ain't willing to shell out to read a David Brooks column once.
While I am gratified to see the end of TimesSelect, I admit that there is cause for concern about the state of traditional newspapers. The New York Times Corporation is going belly up. While that is no great loss in the short run, it is America's classic newspaper. I remember reading New York Times columns when I was doing grad school research on the Civil War. As my blogosphere colleagues like to point out, we bloggers are heavily dependent on the mainstream media. Newspapers have got to figure out how to survive in current environment, but that will take imagination and genius. The New York Times hasn't had either in a long time.
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