Noticed something interesting about Technorati's "top searches this hour" list: ever since the New York Times started its "TimesSelect" program and hid all its opinion columnists behind their paywall, the names of their columnists, and sometimes the titles of their columns, have been clogging up the top ten. Today, six of the top ten searches, in fact, are on Times' columnists names, and a seventh is on the title of Maureen Dowd's latest column, "Dancing in the Dark."
The Times has made a big mistake in taking their most popular content out of the conversation, and the network is routing around the error. People are turning to bloggers, figuring they'll find the gist or the text of their favorite columnists in the blogosphere, and their prayers are being answered. Bloggers are posting the full text of Times columns; I wonder what kind of traffic jumps they're experiencing. And I wonder if the New York Times is now planning to unleash its lawyers on them.
Last summer, during the course of a breakfast meeting with Thomas Friedman (which led to a great column by him embracing Andrew Rasiej's campaign), he asked me what he should do with his Times column on the web once it moved behind the paywall. I said, "Start a blog. There's a huge conversational tail that follows every one of your columns now, that's happening all over the net. If you have a blog, you'll draw a lot of it onto your page, and if the Times is smart, they'll use the fact that people are spending more time on your page to sell more online ads."
Friedman liked the idea, but admitted that he didn't think he had the time to do a blog right. It looks like he's dipping his toes into the water with his "Talking World Affairs" page, which is unfortunately only available to TimesSelect subscribers. Here's how he introduced it:
Welcome to Talking World Affairs. I'm inviting readers to submit comments on, queries about and contrary views to this week's columns. I'll respond to some of them regularly online. I get a lot of e-mail, so please don't be upset if yours isn't answered.
I'll be looking for quality comments and criticism, and I'll try to provide quality answers. But if you're just looking to vent, I would direct you to the letters to the editor section.
I may occasionally be doing some blogging as events arise, although my columns will remain the primary platform through which I express my opinions. But, like everything with the Web, we'll experiment as we go along. Having declared that the world is flat, and having long been a believer in the adage that all of us are smarter than one of us, I felt it was time that I flattened my column as well, and made it a little more interactive.
This is a start, but it's hardly enough. Posting one question from a reader a day (in a really dorky layout, I might add) and answering it is hardly the way to build a community online. If "all of us are smarter than one of us," Friedman should open up his page and let a thousand flowers bloom.
UPDATE: Doc Searls kindly linked to this post, and reminded me of the quote that was kicking around in the back of my subconscious as I wrote this: "The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it." (from John Gilmore, one of the founders of EFF) I like Doc's suggestion for the Times--if it has to revise its business model, it should charge only for access to the new news from the paper online, and then make it all freely available the next day and forward.
Two additional thoughts: the TimesSelect experiment, which I think will fail, is a great example of how the business side is dominating the editorial side of that institution online. One of the great things about the Times is how it mobilizes great resources on behalf of news-gathering, with the question of how to pay for its great efforts (such as its 9-11 coverage) taking a secondary concern. It's clear, still, that the Times leadership views its website first in business terms, and only secondly as part of its editorial product. This is a huge error, given that the Times has something like 14 times as many readers on line than it does of its print edition.
And secondly, think back to one of the great shining moments in print journalism in America, when the Times published the Pentagon Papers revealing the government's secret history of the Vietnam War. The Nixon Administration went to court and got an injunction stopping the Times from publishing. But then other newspapers around the country got copies of the documents and began publishing them too. And soon the government abandoned its case against the Times. That was a pre-Internet example of a network encountering censorship and routing around it.
I'm not suggesting that open access to the NY Times' columnists is as important as the secret history of the Vietnam War, but when you consider the ongoing cultural importance of the Times as an agenda-setter, it's not a good day when that institution chooses to cut its leading opinion-shapers off from a great number of people simply because they can't afford to pay a premium for the privilege of joining the conversation. No wonder people are angry at the Times and searching for ways around the paywall; they should be.
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ANOTHER UPDATE: Nothing like coming late to the party. I just now caught up with Jay Rosen's take on TimesSelect over at his invaluable blog Pressthink. Noting that the Times is touting "exclusive online access" to its columnists, he writes:
... do we value Nicholas D. Kristof’s column more if he’s an “exclusive?” We don’t. In fact, it’s probably the reverse. If everyone is reading a columnist, that makes the columnist more of a must have. If “everyone” isn’t, less of a must. “Exclusive online access” attacks the perception of ubiquity that is part and parcel of a great columnist’s power. In his prime Walter Lippmann was called “the name that opened every door.” Nick Kristof’s brand of human rights journalism, which depends on the mobilization of outrage, is simply less potent if it can’t reach widely around the world, and pass by every door.
Jay's key point: widely circulated opinions, such as the ones generated by their columnists, are more valuable than exclusive ones. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before the Times learns this lesson.
Posted by msifry at September 29, 2005 03:09 PM