CrimsonSelect?

At midnight on September 19, a thousand tiny digital voices, mostly those of New York-area liberals, cried out in unison as they felt the throbbing pain of withdrawal settle in. It wasn’t a lost election (there were plenty of those last year) or even some foreign policy issue handled poorly by the Bush Administration. No, what drove the community of Internet-savvy Democrats crazy was a new ‘feature’ of the New York Times Online web site: a members only $50 per-year subscription section called TimesSelect, which includes all the op-ed columns of (among others) Princeton economist Paul Krugman and occasional Harvard lecturer Thomas Friedman.

If there’s one thing people in general, and college students in particular, don’t like doing online, it’s paying for stuff. Many, many people pirate software, almost everyone here at Harvard pirates music, and we tend to think of content on the web in much the same way as we think of A-’s: freely available and unquestionably deserved.

But, to be fair, restricted access isn’t anything new to us, though in its most common form the cost is wrapped up in our tuition check. LexisNexis (where determined Harvard politicos can still, incidentally, read Krugman’s columns), the Oxford English Dictionary, a whole bunch of e-journals, and our academic records all live behind the ugly yellow PIN Authentication page for a variety of copyright- and privacy-related reasons.

Not only is it not new to us, subscription-only content isn’t new to the commercial journalism scene: the majority of the articles in the Wall Street Journal (ironically, pretty much everything save the opinion columns, which are available for free at opinionjournal.com) have been behind closed doors for some time, an endeavor which has proven quite profitable for the paper—as of this past spring, in fact, more profitable than the ‘paper’ paper itself.

Some online commentators, particularly those interested in Internet business, have lauded this trend: these “hybrid” models with some paid-for and some free content provide real potential for revenue generation, and do so far more reliably than the iffy model of supporting web sites entirely with banner advertisements or pop-up windows. That a powerful and widely-read newspaper such as the New York Times would try something daring like bet on the willingness of the average ‘net-goer’ to pay for their opinions on politics speaks volumes for progress made in the e-business world over the past several years.

Still, idealists would be quick to point out that the aim of a newspaper is not just to be profitable–it’s to be informative and (perhaps) thought provoking. The fact that these columnists are less available may have very real costs: On the night of the 19th, those bloggers with a flair for drama began making bleak predictions of the number of votes the Democratic Party would lose in the next election as a result of the corralling of some of its most celebrated voices.

As entertaining or depressing as this speculation may be, however, there are more interesting reasons why TimesSelect may prove a problematic gesture for the paper, if not for internet journalism in general.

The first has to do with a relatively new mechanism for the consumption of opinion writing which is slowly changing the way people interact with news sources: a truly astounding number of weblogs serve largely as aggregators and meta-commentators. Their authors and owners scour the web looking for controversial articles to read, link to, and tear apart in what may very well be the closest thing to meaningful political discourse this country currently has going for it.

Many of these aggregators have readily denounced TimesSelect: even if they themselves are willing to pay the cost, they still can’t use the articles behind the new wall in good faith because to do so would mean relying on their readers to pony up the dough as well. What good is commenting on an article if your audience can only read your thoughts and not the original text?

This suggests a deeper risk the Times has taken on in adjusting their business plan to try and squeeze some more profit out of their web site: things on the Internet which cost money have a historically-demonstrated tendency to fade away whenever free alternatives exist. Newspapers and television networks no longer have a stranglehold on our information intake—they may still have a good grasp on pure news (which is expensive and difficult to gather well), but anyone with a modem can jot down some opinions, call it an op-ed, and slap it up on a web page for the world to see.

Economist Gary Becker and Appellate Court Judge Richard Posner are one good example of how this can happen: their blog is a widely-read source of valuable political insight. But The Daily Kos is a more interesting case: its author, Markos Zuniga, isn’t a professor or a famous judge—he’s just some guy with good ideas, and yet his site is seen by thousands and thousands of eyes every day.

Internet commerce has proven a valuable and important thing hundreds of times over, and it would be silly to ignore prospects of profitability whenever they make themselves apparent. Still, the Crimson’s first editorial, published in 1873, expressed an important sentiment: “I won’t philosophize. I will be read.” It may be the purpose of an editorial piece to turn a blind eye to the first half of that mantra, but the second half is something all journalists should keep in mind: if the New York Times wants to maintain its position as a leader in the world of political opinion writing, it’s going to have to open its doors a bit more so that we can read what it has to say.

Matthew A. Gline ’06 is a physics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.