9.19.2005
avast!
Arrr! Today be international talk like a pirate day! And 'tis a glorious day for such an event as this: with a sky as grey as me glass of water and as cold as a bilge rat in a tempest.
Speaking of piracy, a few days ago I wrote about opinion columns and how they were taking over as the most valuable commodity that daily newspaper websites had to offer. I'm certainly not the only one who noticed: the New York Times has now come up with TimesSelect, a collection of media goodies that the regular mooching public is no longer invited to enjoy. Op-Ed columnists, News columists, Multimedia, and the New York Times Archive are a few of the TimesSelect services that have now been cruelly ripped out of the hands of those who expect full access to a newspaper which one must pay for in person, but which can be read online for free. I don't know who is right and who is wrong: I tend to feel a little ambivalent in terms of complaining, since it's true that I don't actually pay the Times anything for what I read. And yet, I can't help but think that the real losers are people like Nicholas Kristof and Prof. Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman and David Brooks et al. They are the ones whose no longer available to those who want to read it.
... without paying.
Arrrr!
Speaking of piracy, a few days ago I wrote about opinion columns and how they were taking over as the most valuable commodity that daily newspaper websites had to offer. I'm certainly not the only one who noticed: the New York Times has now come up with TimesSelect, a collection of media goodies that the regular mooching public is no longer invited to enjoy. Op-Ed columnists, News columists, Multimedia, and the New York Times Archive are a few of the TimesSelect services that have now been cruelly ripped out of the hands of those who expect full access to a newspaper which one must pay for in person, but which can be read online for free. I don't know who is right and who is wrong: I tend to feel a little ambivalent in terms of complaining, since it's true that I don't actually pay the Times anything for what I read. And yet, I can't help but think that the real losers are people like Nicholas Kristof and Prof. Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman and David Brooks et al. They are the ones whose no longer available to those who want to read it.
... without paying.
Arrrr!
