The New York Times is ending its TimesSelect program, which charged subscribers $50/year for access to "premium" content, meaning most of their regular columnists. We're going to hear a lot of piffle about how the Times only had about 250,000 subscribers because the content was so widely pirated, but I think that's horse-hockey.
By putting Dowd, Brooks, Rich et al behind a pay portal, the Times effectively reduced their impact on public discourse. The rise of awareness of Salon and Slate in the same period wasn't simply because they were publishing good work (although in the case of Slate's "War Stories" column, it certainly was), it was because only the newspaper's subscribers and 250,000 TimesSelect customers (many of them libraries, one suspects) were reading them.
It's a classic case of forgetting that the product you sell isn't as important as the product you are. If it's not influencing thought and opinions, all the Times is is a newspaper—and those things are dying.
