Holly Sanders of the New York Post is reporting
that the NYT is finally going to abolish its idiotic TimesSelect service –
and about time too. I’m sure that Paul Krugman and the other
firewalled columnists, including Floyd Norris, are very, very
happy.
What’s not clear is the fate of the NYT’s archives. At the moment, sophisticated
bloggers know that they can’t just link to NYT stories: they have to go via
the New York Times Link Generator
first. Otherwise, the link expires after a couple of weeks. But most bloggers
don’t seem to know that. And in general the invaluable NYT archives are not
part of the conversation that is the internet.
The NYT would be very smart to do away with the archive firewall at the same
time as abolishing the TimesSelect firewall, insofar as there’s a difference
between them. It should follow the lead of the Guardian and the BBC, and make
all of its content free online in perpetuity. I’m sure it’s worried about losing
revenue from LexisNexis and the like. But that kind of short-term revenue-driven
thinking is exactly what drove Dow Jones into the arms of Rupert Murdoch. And
no one at the NYT wants to go down that road.