NY Times Liberated!

In case some of you didn't hear, the New York Times made an announcement today regarding their online access model.

As of midnight tomorrow night, all current content, and archives 20 years old or less, will be free.

Free gratis, as Al Swearengen would say.*

I'm excited about this; I have missed reading Op/Ed pieces over the last two years, and have been too poor to pay the subscripion fee to TimesSelect.

No joke, just last week I started thinking that it may be worth paying now.

Lucky me, I waited.

Open information is the wave of the future; notice I don't say "free" information. Because the NY Times is getting paid for this access; we're just not the ones paying cash. We're paying in units of attention and pageviews, which advertisers are happy enough to convert to monetary currency on our behalf. We pay by looking at (and occasionally clicking on) the ads the Times pepper throughout their article. Sadly, this means I'll still have to go through multiple pages to read long articles. But, they still have a "Print Page" CSS layout that does it all at once (if not optimized for screen), so I'll live.

Ads are here to stay, and I for one am much happier to pay the NY Times via my attention and eyespace than currency, at least in this context. Their current layout isn't too bad, and I find this to be a fair trade.

This is as close as we get to having our cake, and eating it, too.


[* If you don't get this reference, go here or here, posthaste!]