The Times Tears Down The Wall

So the Times finally killed off TimesSelect. (My pal Jeff Jarvis pens the definitive obit.) It's good news for everyone, including the Times, but particularly for the Times' op-ed columnists, who are back in the Google/Blogosphere game where they belong. I had lunch a few months ago with a group of editorial and business people from the Times, and one of the questions they asked me was what my experience was like writing for Times Select. I said that one of the bizarre things about it was that if I was purely interested in getting feedback for something I'd written -- via email, or blog links, or comments -- I was much better off posting something to this blog than writing an op-ed for the New York Times. Obviously the readership of the piece itself would be a thousand times bigger in the Times, but because the web version was walled off, the blog ended up being a more efficient means of generating responses.

Anyhow now you can enjoy the fun little series on city life that I wrote for TimesSelect last year, Urban Planet. Just be sure you click on the ads to reward the Times for their decision to drop the paywall.

Comments

[Brijit]

Sure, Times Select was flawed from the get-go. Commodity content gets commodity pricing, so the price of news goes to zero. Great for the consumer... Unless, of course, our unwillingness to pay for content makes it impossible for the unique, high-quality, low-volume, long-form publishers to make a living, in which case we all lose.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the New York Times, which holds itself up as a bastion of editorial integrity and quality journalism, helped kill both?

[karah]

Perhaps we shall see more Urban Planet, please please please? I'm off to go merrily click on ads...

[Sin Jin Lee]

Brijit makes a great point about the news being grounded down to a commodity. There will always be room for high-quality, low-volume, long form publishers though...they just wont be distributing their views through the apparatus of giant media machines.

Btw-thank god for times "select" tearing down the walls. i was getting tired of canceling and reregistering every couple of months for my nyt fix

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