When the New York Times announced two years ago that it was putting its editorial material behind a for-pay firewall, I must have been amongst the few who reacted with pleasure to the news, as I realized immediately that this stupid move would instantaneously mute the likes of Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman to a considerable degree, reducing the shrill cacaphony of the American commentariat and the bloggers who subsist off it by a substantial amount: not having to listen to these two ranting and raving about how Bush is Satan incarnate was worth losing even the more level-headed voices hosted by the Times. That the New York Times' management was arrogant enough to attempt to charge for something not even the mighty Wall Street Journal dared to struck me at the time (as it still does) as a blessing in disguise.
At any rate, the Times itself has now apparently woken up to the incredible shortsightedness of secluding its most popular material behind a subscription firewall for the sake of a little upfront revenue (which would easily have been dwarfed by advertising proceeds in any case), and at a stroke has thereby re-inflicted upon us the hysterical proclamations of Silly Mo Dowd and Paul "I used to be a serious thinker, but no longer" Krugman: the question now is whether the much diminished presence of these two writers caused by the two years in TimesSelect purdah can be overcome, or whether the damage is of the kind from which no recovery is possible. Based on what I've written here, you can guess what my preferred outcome is (and while we're at it, I'd love for the likes of Ann "Crazier than a Coot" Coulter to suffer a similar fate). Life is hard enough as it is without having to incessantly encounter partisan political hysterics dressed up in a mantle of New York Times respectability.
At any rate, whatever happens to the NYT's in-house shrill liberals, the paper will never regain for me the relevance it had in the pre-TimesSelect era, when the day didn't feel complete if I hadn't read the Times in a thorough manner; "TimesSelect" should be taught in business schools as a sterling example of an organization sabotaging its own future for the sake of the present.
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