14 September 2005 (Wednesday)
minor complaint
Yeah, yeah, I need to update this blog with our moving tales. Short story: most of our stuff is in the new apartment, hopefully before we go to sleep tonight all if it will be there, and there will be an open house at the old place on Sunday. Also, many thanks to the friends who will be having us over for Shabbat meals this week and to the other friends who tried to invite us over but were just a little too late. We truly appreciate it.
Anyway, the real reason I'm posting: I just read about the New York Times's new subscription service: TimesSelect. It actually sounds like a pretty interesting deal for $49.95 per year (or free with home delivery of the Times), with liberal access to the article archives and promises of online interaction with columnists. However, it seems like the columns themselves, which are printed in the daily paper and have been available online for free for many years (along with the paper's other content), will no longer be accessible to non-subscribers:
Subscribers to TimesSelect will have exclusive online access to many of our most influential columnists in Op-Ed, Business, New York/Region and Sports. In addition to reading the columns, TimesSelect subscribers can also engage with our columnists through video interviews and Web-only postings.All of our news, features, editorials and analysis will remain free to readers of NYTimes.com, as will our interactive graphics, multimedia and popular video minutes.
Look, either offer your entire newspaper online, or don't. For many of us who read the Times online, home delivery is not a practical option. Fifty dollars per year for the columns (when that's all we want - to read the contents of the print edition) isn't particularly attractive either. Subscription fees are hardly a newspaper's main source of income; the big bucks for almost any print media is in advertising. If you want to be the newspaper of record (as the Times has been calling itself for generations), it would be nice to give the rest of us a glance.
