Starting next week, it will cost money to read some sections of The New York Times online. They say "News, features, editorial and analysis" will remain free but it will now cost $50 a year to belong to TimesSelect, a new subscription service that will basically give you the columns (opinion and otherwise) and access to the Times archives. This, they've announced, will include articles back 25 years at first, eventually to expand all the way back to 1851 when William Safire's worldview was more or less current.
The archive service, depending on how complete it is, could be quite valuable…but I'm guessing that most people who would care about it already have subscriptions, perhaps through their employers, to Lexis/Nexis or some other such service. Some folks might pay for the columnists but the question is how available this material will be for websurfers who don't cough up the subscription fee. I'm guessing a number of political websites will start pirating and posting the words of Paul Krugman, Thomas Friedman, Frank Rich, etc. If they don't, those columnists are going to become highly irrelevant in a hurry. I mean, why pay for Maureen Dowd when you can get Molly Ivins for free? Why pay for David Brooks when a hundred free sites will give you David Broder? Why pay for Safire's occasional columns when you can go to a crooked psychic and get predictions that don't come true? The importance of an opinion columnist has a lot to do with how often they are quoted.
I'm going to spring for the fifty bucks just to see what you get, but I'm guessing very few individuals will, and the Times probably knows that. They've got to be betting that companies will subscribe in sufficient number; that the income from that will seem like a decent trade-off for stifling the reach of their columnists. And I'm betting that they're betting wrong and that before the year is out, the columnists are moved to the free area and the Times either issues partial refunds or gives us something to make up for the change in service. We shall see.