Making TimesSelect Worth My $50

By: David S. Hirschman At the Webby awards Monday night, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, one of the honorees, told an interviewer he "hated" the paper's TimesSelect pay-wall, behind which the paper now hides his bi-weekly columns. "It pains me enormously, because it's cut me off from a lot of people, especially because I have a lot of people who read me overseas, in India and what not," he said, acknowledging in the next breath that his employer still needed to make money in order to fund the frequent trips he takes around the now-flat world to write his column.

"We're not in the business of free," he said.

But here's a little not-so-secret for Friedman and his readers in Bangalore. Even with the TimesSelect wall up, all of his columns are available for free online anyway, usually not more than a few hours after they are published. All you need to do is a quick search and voila: someone, somewhere, with a blog and access to a TimesSelect account has inevitably reposted the entire column.

Reposting copyrighted material is, of course, illegal, but it's hard to imagine that the Times Co. sics their $400-per-hour lawyers on any but the most egregious cases. Could they possibly have the motivation to go after some blogger in Bolivia who felt compelled to cut-and-paste Frank Rich's weekly anti-Bush sermon-to-the-converted? Unlikely. And even if the paper spends the time and effort, and the offending blogger ceases and desists, some other desktop publisher from another part of this ever-so-flat world is simultaneously cutting-and-pasting the same column into Movable Type and sticking it online a moment later.

Basically, the wall is there but there are plenty of holes. So if execs at the Times have been banking on this new media adaptation of the newspaper "honor box" model to solve the problems created by shifting news habits, they'd better start working on a backup plan.

I am among the vast majority out there who still haven't signed up for TimesSelect. I've seen what's being offered behind the wall (video, podcasts, special stories, interviews, archives), and, to my mind, it's just not worth it.

But there are others who have gone for it. Last month, a release from the Times announced that there were 482,000 subscribers to the service. Unfortunately for the paper, 62% of that number got it for free as subscribers to the print edition. Boston Globe business columnist Brett Arends did the math: only about 183,000 users (out of 11.9 million monthly visitors) had actually plunked down the $50 annual fee to read the Times Op-Ed columnists and gain access to the other features -- essentially one reader in 65.

Could the revenue generated from those 183,000 readers be worth choking off the worldwide audience for these premiere columnists? Perhaps the paper doesn't think it could make up that new pay revenue in ad dollars from a fresh jolt in traffic, but as PBS columnist Mark Glaser wrote an open letter to Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. last week, free content supported by online advertising has been "working miracle after miracle." In a subsequent column Glaser used a variety of ad models to try and determine the pros and cons of making the paper's Op-Ed team into bloggers.

I'm with Glaser when he asks Sulzberger to "tear down this pay-wall." The value and brand of the Times (and the influence of the paper's columnists) increases exponentially as more people read its pages online. But if the Gray Lady insists on keeping TimesSelect, I might be more inclined to join if I perceived more value to the service that goes above and beyond the content I can get from my "friend" who is posting in La Paz.

Fifty bucks isn't nothing (an evening at an off-Broadway show, several annual subscriptions to Vanity Fair at professional rate, a month of feeding a starving child via Sally Struthers, etc.), and I can be pretty cheap. But I do have a few suggestions for TimesSelect features that might inspire me to get out my credit card:


The ability to elect and eliminate columnists.

Are you tired of the same old Herberts and Friedmans and Dowds writing the same columns week after week, year after year? Do you wish there was new blood a little more frequently? Well, what if as a TimesSelect subscriber you had the power to vote your least favorite columnist off the island?

Columnists on the most valuable opinion-writing real estate in the world shouldn't have the kind of life-tenure Supreme Court justices enjoy. Like the rest of us, they should be constantly subject to performance reviews and evaluations.

To that end, every six months there would be an online nomination process for worthy outsiders to be considered for a spot on the Op-Ed page, with a separate ballot to vote off one of the current columnists. Finally, in a nail-biting "American Idol"-style videocast finale, the columnist with the least votes is taken off the page while a new voice is added. Memo to execs: seems like a pretty easy event to sell ads on.

The losing columnist would be given an emeritus blog on NYTimes.com, and, through that, could perhaps work his or her way back onto the print page (and back behind the TimesSelect pay-wall) after six months of soul-searching about why they lost out the last time. Special elections would be held as well every time a columnist retired or left the page for other reasons.


A New Yorker-like caption contest each day for a selected news photograph.

The winner gets a framed print of the photo and their witty one-liner on the NYTimes.com homepage. (It should probably be made clear to the photo editor that they should shy away from pictures of war zones or people who will be likely to sue.)


Each columnist has to write an additional online column each month specifically devoted to readers' assignments.

In the vein of Georges Perec, a reader might challenge metro columnist Clyde Haberman to write 1200 cogent words about the MTA without use of the letter "r". Or perhaps Maureen Dowd could be assigned a column on Bill Clinton without recourse to any puns, cutesy phrases, or made-up words.


Monthly "truth-or-dare" for a selected columnist.

One lucky subscriber each month can ask John Tierney a pointed question about his long-ago tryst with MoDo, or compel Friedman to shave the mustache. Columnists who opt out have a certain number of votes deducted at the next election. There could also be a regular win-a-date-with feature, where instead of having to go all the way to Darfur with Nicholas Kristof, you can rope him into picking you up at the airport or helping paint your apartment.


An online-only VH1-produced reality program.

In the style of "The Real World," the entire stable of columnists would be taped living in the same house together (preferably a cramped Brooklyn walk-up), documenting how discussions of Iran and immigration devolve into slap-fights over who spent too much time in the bathroom that morning. Again, lame-os who suddenly feel the need to take "personal days" have votes deducted. Only four episodes every six months though, though, because, well ... that's about as much as we all could probably stand.


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I can't guarantee that I still won't choose the off-Broadway show instead of the subscription, but on TimesSelect voting nights I would definitely pressure friends into giving me their passwords. And if there were any way to get illegal versions of the "Real Times World" reality show clips off of YouTube, I'd definitely tune in.