Ding, dong, the witch is dead. Which old witch? The wicked witch! Hurray, Times Select is no more. If you don't know what I'm talking about, the New York Times had put Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd and several other of their popular columnists and their archives behind a subscriber firewall. About fifty bucks a year or eight bucks a month. Now, even though they were making about $10 million a year off the deal, they decided that "projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising.” Now, we can finally access those columnists online again.
Wait, the news gets better. The Times has also opened up part of their archives to the general, freeloading public. You can access any article from 1987 to the present. Even better, the Times has opened up its archives from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. Some articles in the other years - 1923 to 1986 will be free. This means a Civil War junkie like myself can now see what the Times wrote about..oh, say, the Battle of Chickamauga back in the day. (I might have been able to do this already since these articles are in the public domain. Don't know. Not sure.)
And one more thing. Most of the columnists now have their own blogs in addition to their columns. I've already saved Paul Krugman's in my RSS reader.
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