A Letter to Readers About TimesSelect
Dear NYTimes.com Readers:
Effective Sept. 19, we are ending TimesSelect. All of our online readers will now be able to read Times columnists, access our archives back to 1987 and enjoy many other TimesSelect features that have been added over the last two years – free.
By the New York Times
Times kills for-pay service – till next downturn
I never really understood the logic behind the for-pay service, launched in 2005, at a perfect counter-cyclical moment, just as everyone else on the Web was finally realizing that online advertising was beginning to fulfill the outsized promises made a decade before.
It is this form of continuous knee-jerk reaction to market fluctuation that dooms the dinosaurs of today’s news business. These companies, like their companions in the broadcast and movie and publishing industries, seem to be incapable of taking risks and making long-term bets on new businesses. So they’re stuck in this dance of death, circling in the quest for a business model, always a little behind the curve.
By Scott Rosenberg
What a pain it’s been waiting for this NYT content to free up and release its true value – but what a statement it makes about how to build an economy (i.e. the Web) by giving away the parts for free. Then – to continue the digression here – when the infrastructure’s in place, you can find ways to charge for things that you may not have thought of originally (e.g. advertising in a distribution space that previously didn’t exist).
Hmm, must be time for some more James Cherkoff talking about the method of FREE – let’s do that next.
