NYT web site less accessible

Web readers: The New York Times is no longer completely free online. While the news stories are still free, if you want to read those great New York Times op-eds by the likes of Paul “Rabid Dog” Krugman, Thomas “Self-dramatizing Liberal Idiot” Friedman, Maureen “Sold My Soul to the Devil” Dowd, Bob “One-Note Resentment against White America” Herbert, and David “Times House Conservative for Liberalism” Brooks, you’ll have to pay a subscription fee. What a loss. I’m crying.

The Times’ need to counteract its declining revenues (could the market for a hate-filled, homosexualist view of the world be more limited than the Times thought?) is one obvious reason to charge online readers for some features. However, Donald Luskin at NRO suggests another possible intriguing factor in the Times’ decision to make its op-ed columnists unavailable to the average Web user:

Maybe the Times has decided that it needs to call a halt to the way its mostly Leftist columnists are regularly chewed up and spit out by conservatives in the increasingly influential blogosphere. According to Editor & Publisher, “Gail Collins says that everyone involved in this decision understands that there … will be fewer mentions and links in the blogosphere.”

Another Times-related item brought up by Luskin is that its public editor, Byron Calame, has publicly taken editorial page editor Gail Collins to task for not requiring Paul Krugman to correct his false statement that two media consortia had found that Gore won in Florida. It appears that the Times’ new ombudsman is not as worthless as was earlier reported.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 26, 2005 01:06 PM | Send