Charging for Columnists

PressThink: Charging for Columnists: Notes and Comment on the Launch of TimesSelect: ""If one faction wanted to go the Wall Street Journal's pay wall route, and another wanted to remain free like the Post, then TimesSelect is not a hypothesis for how to succeed on the Web, but just a mid-point between competing theories. That alone is reason to worry."
“Despite all that has happened, I still think that The New York Times has a stature and a position of journalistic authority that is greater than any news organization in the world. Could that be destroyed? I believe that it could be.”— Alex S. Jones, former reporter, New York Times, co-author of The Trust, a history of the Sulzberger family, in Business Week, January 17, 2005.
I agree with Jones: it could be. And I have some thoughts on the launch of TimesSelect, the new premium content package from the New York Times, which throws the columnists behind a pay wall, and opens the archives to Select subscribers.

Outing: “Steve Klein, an online journalism professor at George Mason University, says one of his students raised an excellent point during a class discussion this week about TimesSelect: ‘Even if the Times picked up most of its existing online readers, how are they going to grow a new generation of online Op-Ed readers if they keep the columnists behind a pay firewall?’ Good question.”