Gems from the archive of the New York Times
Now that the NY Times has discontinued their Times Select subscription program and made much more of their 150+ years of content available for anyone to read and link to, let's take a look at some of the more notable items that the non-subscriber has been missing.
Context & Ripple Effects
Three days after the Times announced it would end charges on its web site, Jason Kottke is doing what the move was designed to enable: mining the newly opened 150-year archive and surfacing notable pieces non-subscribers had been locked out of under Times Select. The post doubles as a demonstration of the strategy's core mechanic — free, linkable archival content turns bloggers into unpaid distribution.
First-order effects
- Readers and bloggers gain unrestricted access to over 150 years of Times reporting and opinion, with linking now permitted rather than paywalled.
- The columnists and archive material that justified the Times Select subscription fee lose their exclusive status overnight, dissolving the program's value proposition entirely.
Second-order effects
- Other papers operating subscriber walls face an immediate comparison point: Doc Searls' syndicated take ('Earth to Newspapers: Abandon Fort Business') frames the Times move as a template rivals must answer for.
- Traffic economics invert — inbound blog links like Kottke's now feed ad-supported pageviews instead of being blocked at the subscription gate, shifting the archive from a revenue line to a traffic engine.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across the industry, news archives stop being walled subscription assets and become open discovery layers that monetize through advertising and search visibility — a structural retreat from per-article charging that would force publishers to find value elsewhere in the bundle.
The trend: Newspapers in 2007 are abandoning paid web-subscription programs in favor of open, linkable, ad-funded content, with the Times as the test case others are watching.