Free Again: Times Select ~ Do We Care?


Mustang Bobby alerts us to the the fact that the New York Times is mostly free again via online access and that:

So starting tomorrow, Maureen Dowd, Thomas L. Friedman, Frank Rich, Gail Collins, Paul Krugman, David Brooks, Bob Herbert and Nicholas D. Kristof and all the rest will be liberated from their purgatory and will no longer rely on the kindness of strangers for getting their word out to the electronic masses.

Frankly, I haven’t missed reading these folks* and wouldn’t mind if they kept them behind the wall. When one of them said something really interesting as MB notes:

…there was probably one reader or blogger who went around the gate and posted the material for free on other websites or excerpted enough of the articles for blog commenting as to render the pay site pointless.

Isn’t the most important thing about this the news archives:

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

Over the past two years I’ve been stopped in mid-track many times by the archive wall when wanting to read something a couple weeks old.
Yea, there were workarounds but now just the news, please.

*Guilty: I read them before the wall went up and will probably read and blog them again not that the wall is down. But, as above, I have not missed them!