MoDo, Krugman Freed From Obscurity

In an attempt at recapturing attention formerly paid to their stable of idiotic columnists, The New York Times has paved the way to return their overpriced and uninformed solons to the public consciousness.

Honestly, people had grown used to ignoring the likes of the besotted Maureen Dowd, affirmative action columnist Bob Herbert, clueless theater critic Frank Rich, and the psychotic-yet-entertaining Paul Krugman ever since The Times made the disastrous decision to actually charge people to read these morons.

Well, now we'll be able to poke fun at them on a more regular basis.

TimesSelect Content Freed

August 7, 2007 -- The New York Times is poised to stop charging readers for online access to its Op-Ed columnists and other content, The Post has learned.

After much internal debate, Times executives - including publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. - made the decision to end the subscription-only TimesSelect service but have yet to make an official announcement, according to a source briefed on the matter.

No doubt it will drive them crazy to see the New York Post reporting this, but then again, The Post has been beating them to major stories for quite some time.

The timing of when TimesSelect will shut down hinges on resolving software issues associated with making the switch to a free service, the source said.

Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis would only say in an e-mailed statement, "We continue to evaluate the best approach for NYTimes.com."

While other online publications were abandoning subscriptions, the Times took the opposite approach in 2005 and began charging for access to well-known writers, including Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Thomas L. Friedman.

The decision, which also walled off access to archives and other content, was controversial almost from the start, with some of the paper's own columnists complaining that it limited their Web readership.

No kidding. When was the last time you heard anyone quoting what any of these people had to say?

The number of Web-only subscribers who pay $7.95 a month or $49.95 a year fell to just over 221,000 in June, down from more than 224,000 in April.

I'm surprised the number was that high.

Well, this will just gives us more opportunity to lambaste the incoherent ramblings of the bourbon-soaked Dowd and regale in the armchair military analysis of Rich, a man who couldn't find his way across midtown Manhattan without benefit of a chauffeur, let alone find Iraq on a map.

UPDATE: Others discussing include A Blog For All, Don Surber,
Sister Toldjah, Captain's Quarters, The Moderate Voice.