The New York Times:The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight tonight.This is good news indeed. I hope the Wall Street Journal soon follows suit.The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to The Times and to some students and educators.
In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain.
(HT Lifehacker)
1 comment:
The Wall Street Journal will most likely still keep their fee, because their readers are willing to pay for it. In fact the WSJ has been one of the few online operations to make a fee based access system really work for it.
With the NY Times the problem was that not as many people wanted to read the works of its predominantly very left wing editorial columnists.
Plus people were already used to getting that content for free. It was much harder to ask people to begin paying for something they had come to think of as a free service.
With the WSJ the expectations have already been set that access is not free.
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