Accessibility of Media
Some people might be interested to know that in September, the New York Times plans to start charging readers a fee to access portions of its Web site. By signing up for TimesSelect, which will cost $49.95 a year, readers will be able to access online articles written by Times columnists as well as the newspaper's online archives, among other features. (Home-delivery subscribers will not have to pay a fee to access the same material.)
At first glance, this plan makes sense to me because the observations of the Times's columnists are unique to the paper. One can get news and cultural listings from a variety of free sources, but by paying for this service, one pays for access to the Times's personalities. (One analogy that comes to mind is the people who are getting satellite radio just so they will be able to continue listening to Howard Stern.)
Because I rarely read opinion pieces in newspapers, I don't know if the service is something I'd subscribe to. It might be worth it just for access to the Times archives; once I graduate, there'll be no more free Lexis-Nexis for me.
Filed in: Media Technology
posted by mlliu at 9:08 PM
1 Comments:
Hey Lisa! I got here through Dan's link ^_^
Interesting news about the Times. I don't care much for the opinion columns -- if an op-ed is noteworthy enough, it'd be flying around all over the Web. The archives would be the one access I'd hate to lose.
I think I'll stick to grabbing a free NYT at the school I work at whenever it's available ;)
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