I hope you're right, Phil. I sense that Friedman, Dowd and the rest are now poised to play catch up to the other open-source pundits that abound on the net.
Chuck's also right about the impracticality of walling in content that will seep out into the public domain regardless. (Though I'll tell you, I have seen some New Yorker pieces that are impossible to find unabridged online.)
I have sort of mixed feelings.
Yes, charging for premium content as a business model might work in some situations. The problem is that once it's available for a fee - it ends up being posted on blogs anyhow. And there's no way to police the internet - or sue the bloggers. The Times would spend more than they'd be making.
If I saw an op-ed headline peek out of the Orange Curtain and really wanted to read it - I'd do a a Google blog search and I'd find it somewhere. Often, there were three or four blogs that linked to each other - so one blog would have the acceptable pull (a couple of paragraphs) and it would directly link to another blog with the next two paragraphs, and the next blog would ....
The reason I never signed up for Times Select is because after reading ten or so pieces by Freidman, Brooks, Herbert, Herbert, Dowd and Rich five or six times you know what they're going to say anyway - just with the led (although Dowd is worth reading because she's funny).
And yes: These folks are not as influential as they were before Times Select. Brooks, Dowd, Friedman, and Krugman would be talked about endlessly.
Maybe three or four times in the last two years some special feature (not an Op-Ed piece) was behind the Orange Curtain and I wanted it. Oh, well. I don't remember what they were at the moment - so they couldn't have been that earth-shattering.
The Times should charge ten or twenty bucks a year for access to their archives. I'd probably pay that.
Following in the footsteps of Time/Warner. I think it's a good thing.
I noticed when TimesSelect went live that names like "krugman" and "dowd" were among the top-ten Technorati searches. People with fairly average internet skills were able to get the content free anyways. 'bout time...
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