What do Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich have in common besides being op-ed columnists in the New York Times? At the risk of sounding egocentric, the answer is that I am an avid reader of all three. Their articles were initially accessible online to the general public; then, some cerebrally challenged bloke in the upper echelons of the Times organisation had the bright idea of introducing “TimesSelect”, which provided unfettered access to those who were willing to pay for it and (luckily!) universities. As a result, over the past couple of years, my path to their compositions has been rather convoluted, especially after moving from one campus to another: start the VPN client, open the Lexis Nexis browser through the UIUC library system, search for “friedman” et al., and settle down to five minutes of textual ecstasy.
Why write about this, you might wonder. Well, as of today, TimesSelect has officially been canned, which means that we’re back to status quo ante. Apparently, the moolah that the NYT raked in through advertising outweighed the revenue from subscriptions. Duh! For once, ads have served a useful purpose.
