Decision ‘08

TimeSelect: The Turnkey Solution For Suppressing Dissent

Mickey Kaus has been on an absolute tear ever since the pinheads at the Times started their subscription wall. Today, the brilliant Kaus has had a breakthrough:

Why does China have to spend millions on new repressive opinion-blocking technologies and new complicated anti-speech rules when it could just adopt TimesSelect across the board and accomplish the same thing more efficiently and with less controversy?… The NYT might even lease its proprietary TimesSelect technology to threatened dictatorships around the globe as a turnkey solution to their Internet dissent problems. Worried about subversive pro-democracy agitators? Just make them part of TimesSelect’s premium content and they’ll never be heard from again! … It’s yet another coveted supplemental revenue stream opened up by Pinch Sulzberger’s Web pathfinders….

Not since the heyday of Jayson Blair has the Times come under this much well-justified ridicule…

7 Responses to “TimeSelect: The Turnkey Solution For Suppressing Dissent”

1 peter Says:
September 26th, 2005 at 7:08 pm
I don’t get it — the columns and articles in the Times are part of their intellectual property, and if they want to charge for it, so be it — it’s no different from a record label charging customers to buy a CD (or, for a more apt analogy, downloading the songs from iTunes).

If you want to see the Times’s content, all you have to do is go to the newsstand and plunk down a dollar — is this such a hardship?
2 Mark Says:
September 26th, 2005 at 7:17 pm
Nope, it’s not a hardship at all - provided the marginal benefit of that dollar is best served by reading MoDo. For myself, she was worth a mouseclick, but not one thin dime…and that’s Mickey’s point; how big would Google be if they charged per search? It’s their algorithm, they too can charge for its use. The subscription website, while feasible, is a highly dubious business model…
3 peter Says:
September 26th, 2005 at 7:43 pm
Well, maybe MoDo isn’t for you, but hey, the Yankees are tied with the Red Sox — where else are you going to get that kind of coverage? Not to mention the crossword puzzles…
4 Dennis Says:
September 27th, 2005 at 10:09 am
Well now, they’re a half-game up (says the nervous Yankees fan).

I’m a newspaper editor myself (yes, I’m destroying the system from within), so I feel a certain sympathy with doing what you can to make Web content pay. But the problem with the system the Times has set up is it is so clearly designed by people who don’t really understand the Internet, and have no idea that finding smart punditry for free is incredibly simple. I like some of the Times columnists, I dislike others and I find some to be weightless hacks (OK, we all know I’m talking about MoDo here). But none of them are so outstandingly different that I’d be willing to pay for every thought that drips from their brain when there’s a free flood of ideas available.

I suspect this might have worked better if the Times had the courage of their convictions and made everything on their site pay-only. But that’s a big gamble to make. If this particualr gamble doesn’t work, the only harm done will be to the columnists themselves, and I guess TPTB don’t care enough about them to worry.
5 Fred Says:
September 27th, 2005 at 1:39 pm
Why not an a la carte business model? I’d subscribe to the Times again if the op-ed page was restricted only to the op-ed page and I could say thanks, but no thanks, to Krugman and Dowd.
6 Mark Says:
September 27th, 2005 at 2:34 pm
Fred, actually, they have a per-article option (I suppose you can use it for the columnists), but it would get VERY pricey quick…I suppose you’re thinking more of Build-Your-Own-Times…
7 Fred Says:
September 27th, 2005 at 3:26 pm
More like Edit-Your-Own Times.