by CKR
And the Washington Post and New York Times are collaborating (inadvertently) to give us a big one!
Even as the Washington Post adds blog-like columns, the New York Times, on Monday, will end free access to its editorial page. If you’ve got a subscription to the paper version or are willing to pay fifty bucks a year, they’ll let you read them and even throw in some access to the archives. But not the great unwashed.
But that’s not all the Washington Post is doing. According to Andrew Sullivan, a pass-through to his blog will appear on the WaPo opinion page, with rotation to other blogs. And, to delight all bloggers, if they link to a WaPo article, they will get their fifteen minutes of fame! Yes, there is a link to WhirledView right next to the article I’ve linked! We do get hits (Welcome, WaPo readers!) from those links, even when we’ve moved off the “front page.”
Walter Pincus even left a comment at Arms Control Wonk.
That’s motivation for bloggers to use WaPo as their primary news link.
I’ll miss the Times opinion page. But there have been more and more days when I don’t bother to read anything there. And I’ve been reading the Los Angeles Times to prepare for losing the NYT.
Even if I chose to subscribe to the NYT, it’s dumb to link to articles that my readers may not be able to access. How many links do you see to the Wall Street Journal, another bastion of pay-for-it-or-forget-it. I thought about doing a congratulatory post a month or so ago, when Maureen Dowd started using hyperlinks regularly. As I recall, there was even one to one of the better-known blogs. But then I thought, this is pretty elementary stuff.
So NYT is taking the position of the king in that wonderful Oliphant cartoon. WaPo is inviting us in for a big, inclusive party. It’s going to be interesting to see how it all works out. That’s why I love experiments.
Nadezhda writes a much more thoughtful post on the subject, thinking through business models.