Bye-bye NY Times Select

Two years ago the blogging community gave a collective thumbs down to the
NY Times decision to hide it's most read columnists behind a subscription.  $50 a year!  No way!  For a while various websites posted the hidden columns, but even that was shut down when those sites were threatened with lawsuits.

But low and behold, it looks like the NY Times has seen the light.  Reading through Howard Kurtz's inane column on OJ, a small paragraph at the bottom jumped out at me:

Hey -- Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Tom Friedman and company have been liberated! The NYT is ending its unpopular experiment of charging 50 bucks a year for online access to its columnists.

Well, it only took them two years to realize that it was a horrible idea.

Reuters has the story.

The New York Times Co said on Monday it will end its paid TimesSelect Web service and make most of its Web site available for free in the hopes of attracting more readers and higher advertising revenue.

It goes on to say

The move is an acknowledgment by The Times that making Web site visitors pay for content would not bring in as much money as making it available for free and supporting it with advertising.

Gee, yah think?