A somewhat amusing game is currently being played around the blogosphere…and by the way, there's got to be a better name for it than that. "Online community?" "World of weblogs?" Anyway…
Monday, the New York Times put its op-ed columnists behind a subscription wall: Pay or you can't read Maureen Dowd. A lot of webloggers ordinarily wouldn't care about this but it seems to be an irresistible challenge. How do we get for free what the Times now wants to charge us for? They keep finding ways and someone (probably, many someones) at the Times keeps running around, closing off those routes.
Shortly after the wall went up, many bloggers discovered you could read the restricted columns by merely adjusting the wording of the URL. That's the webpage address. The new, subscription-only addresses have the word "select" in them and if a non-subscriber edited it out, it went to the page for free. This revelation spread across the Internet and the trick really did work…for about six hours. Web-watchers at the Times, I'm guessing, were monitoring websites, learned of the loophole and quickly had it closed.
Other webloggers noted that some other newspapers that carried Times columnists in their print editions were posting columns on their free websites. The Times seems to have stepped in and told at least some of those newspapers that they can't do that. This weblog is attempting to track where the columns appear for free but as you'll see if you try some of the links, some (not all) of the articles have disappeared before they were supposed to expire.
There's a place called The Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive that has posted his first subscription-era column. We'll see how long that practice continues. The big test of the whole system may come this weekend when Frank Rich's column is posted. Will it quickly be available to non-subscribers?
I've gone ahead and subscribed to TimesSelect…or at least, I'm on their 2-week free trial, which will roll over to an annual subscription if I don't cancel in twelve days. A lot of people, I'm guessing, will opt out then and the Times will have a better idea of how successful this new idea will be. I'm not sure yet if I'll be among those sticking around. Access to the New York Times archives is nice, but in two weeks I'll have pulled up and saved a lot of articles. If some of the columnists (especially Rich) are still available for free, then I'm not sure why I'd want to pay the fifty bucks a year.
The Times recently announced massive layoffs. You get the feeling there'll be more after the first two weeks of this new plan?