Robert Denton

The Grey Lady's Paywall Cracks?

‘NYT’ Opening TimesSelect to Students and Teachers for Free

NEW YORK The New York Times is opening up access permanently to TimesSelect to all students and faculty who have .edu e-mail addresses beginning on March 13.

In 2005 I mentioned the forthcoming wall between some of the most excellent columnists as a loss. I still feel this way even though we get the Sunday Times and therefore have access to all content at the NYT.

It’s a total loss that many of the great columns can’t be shared and read by all alike. In fact, even though I am a NYTimes subscriber and have full access to the content I read the closed off columns less now than I did before.

Why?

It’s about continuous partial attention (edit: that link is dead-pooled, so is the domain it might have pointed to, so linking instead to wikipedia) continuous partial attention — we have it and the NYTimes murdered their readership by cutting off the possibility that my continuous partial attention to their outlet was increased by people frequently sharing their articles across the blogosphere.

Who talks about a NYTimes opinion piece anymore? Not as many people do simply because the content is blocked for all people save for some ~650k subscribers.

So instead of grabbing a surf board and riding the wave into the future, the NYTimes chose to try and build a sand castle. Is this new opening up an admission or really just a marketing attempt to try and build the future subscriber base? I am real interested in some numbers at the times…