by CKR
The New York Times took down its wall today. The full opinion page and archives back to 1987 are now open to all of us.
I peruse the offerings, no longer warned off by the orange logo. Paul Krugman, yes; David Brooks, not today; Maureen Dowd, likewise. Not quite an extravaganza, but we will see their columns linked more frequently now.
It was almost exactly two years ago that the experiment began. Now newspapers even have "blogs" of their own. I put the word in quotes because I find most of them less fresh, more manufactured, than the other regions of the blogosphere.
It's been fairly obvious that the current users of the internet (and those who have arrived in the last two years) are reluctant to pay for content. This is a problem for the newspapers, whose classified advertising is being drained away to the internet. And some of us get ad-blocking software so we don't have to endure shimmering, jumping, blinking distractions in our peripheral vision field. I should click on such irritation...why?
The current conceptions of the market aren't working well for the internet. Google may have a model that works, but they're not saying much about it. The idealism of Wikipedia and open-source software are having some success.
But there's not a clearcut model. That's good. It gives all of us an opportunity to develop new ways of doing things.
Reactions from around the Web:
And, of course, the raison d’être for Wealthy Frenchman disappears. Thanks, Montag!
Update (9/20/07): The Washington Post has changed its page format to put the ads on only one side of the page and to allow the text to be wider. But they've taken away the "Who's Blogging" feature. We weren't getting many hits from that any more, so I'm not too unhappy about that. The Web hasn't settled into a routine yet, and competition continues.