E&P: Want to e-Mail a 'New York Times' Columnist? Subscribe to TimesSelect

[DeepModem Mom]

Want to e-Mail a 'New York Times' Columnist? Better Subscribe to TimesSelect
By Joe Strupp
Published: January 17, 2006 7:00 PM ET

NEW YORK If you haven't signed up for TimesSelect, The New York Times' online subscription product, don't bother e-mailing the paper's star columnists.

Since the Times put the words of its eight Op-Ed columnists behind a paid wall last September, it has also decided that only TimesSelect subscribers should be allowed to e-mail Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, et al.

Back in September the Times asked the hundreds of papers who publish the Op-Ed contributors through The New York Times News Service (NYTNS) to stop printing the writers' e-mail addresses with the columns (and to take the columns off their Web sites, too). Apparently not everyone got the message, because last week the Times' syndication service sent out an advisory reminding its client papers to remove the e-mail addresses.

"If you are not a TimesSelect subscriber you won't have access to that e-mail functionality," Times spokesman Toby Usnik confirmed Tuesday. "It centralizes around the TimesSelect site."

But instead of being able to put an address in a mail program and firing it off at your leisure, TimesSelect subscribers now have to fill out an online form similar to the generic feedback forms found on many Web sites....

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001847386

[rodeodance]

1. exclusionary practices reign high.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

2. anyone know how badly Select is doing financially?

Shouldn't the NYTC be reporting income/costs to the shareholders?

[Salviati]

3. I know that I havent been to NYT online since they dropped the curtain...

I imagine that their readership must have plummeted...

[ChairmanAgnostic]

4. same con mois.

And I promised not to resubscribe until they make some drastic changes on top.

[DrDebug]

5. They don't want too many visitors

That's why all the newspapers are getting registrations and subscriptions etc. It's because they can't control the internet and cannot be big profits on it either. Therefore they attempt to limit access for whatever reason they can find.

What is happening right before us is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a God- like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.

Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle.

(...)

At the same time, we may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net. There are of course inherent risks in this strategy -- chief among them maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability. Plainly, we can’t vouch for the quality of people who aren’t regularly employed by us – and bloggers could only add to the work done by our reporters, not replace them. But they may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve. So long as our readers understand the distinction between bloggers and our journalists.

- Rupert Murdoch

http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2005/04/rupert-murdoch-evil-but-not-stupid.html

Via blogspot because the story is hidden behind registration and subscription sites nowadays...