One glance at the “most emailed articles” list on the New York Times Web site is enough to see what an adverse effect the new pay wall, TimesSelect, is having on readership of the paper’s columnists. Before, Frank Rich’s long Sunday column about politics and culture or Thomas Friedman’s musings on the shape of the world would often take top spots on the list. As of this morning, however, the most emailed article was a piece on bicycle seats and erectile dysfunction — and number three was a review of the new movie featuring that loveable Gumbyesque duo of Wallace and Gromit.
It’s been over two weeks now since the Times began charging $49.95 a year for online readers to see the daily op-ed columns by Krugman, Brooks, Kristof, Dowd, et al. Of course, there’s always resistance to paying today for what was free yesterday. The Times’ dilemma — and that of most newspaper Web sites — is that as soon as it went online in the first place, it gained the status of a public service, free for all to use. (That’s why the site, one of the most highly trafficked on the web, still gets about 350 million page views a month.)
But it is no longer totally free. And its reading public is not happy. Joe Achenbach, on his Washington Post blog, is already comparing Maureen Dowd columns to “samizdat,” the Soviet-era term for illegal writings circulated in the underground. Frustrated at not being able to access their favorite columnist, Achenbach writes, “My acquaintances simply throw Dowd parties. An email goes out: ‘Dowdfest at MacArthur Blvd. Starbucks!’ And then everyone converges. Someone always has a photocopy of Mo’s latest savage tweaking of the Bush dynasty. It’s never clear where the samizdat originates — I assume some computer whiz has hacked into the TimesSelect wallgarden. Although I haven’t done a full survey, I believe the Frank Rich crowd gets together at Java House, the Paul Krugman fans gather at Busboys & Poets, and the David Brooksians can be found at the Metropolitan Club. The key thing is, TimesSelect is bringing people together in new mini-communities that are dedicated not only to their favorite Times columnist but also to the principle that no one should be forced to pay for opinion columns. It feels revolutionary. It feels like the Prague Spring.”
At least someone’s seeing a silver lining to this cloud. Dowd herself apparently isn’t — at least, that’s what Editor & Publisher hinted at yesterday in an article noting that Dowd seems to be opting out of the TimesSelect fun. To get readers to pony up that $49.95, the paper promised that its columnists would provide bonus content and services for subscribers. Dowd “so far has offered nothing original, beyond her twice-weekly print column,” E&P reports. While we now know that Frank Rich is reading Blink and The Greatest Game Ever Played, and that Brooks’ favorite Web sites are National Review Online and Andrew Sullivan’s blog (surprise, surprise), Dowd’s page offers few extras — “clips from her appearances on ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘Meet the Press,’ and previous pieces about her mother and her vacation in Cancun.”
Whether or not Dowd is trying to tear at the walls from within, there no doubt that bloggers are trying to tear at them from without. John Tabin at Never Pay Retail is just one of several bloggers who have been posting daily links to the columnist’s work on other free Web sites. (After all, the Times’ syndication service sells the columns to dozens of other newspapers, many of which then promptly slap them up on their own Web pages.) Until the Times figures out how to plug that pesky hole, people will just keep jumping the turnstile.
An E&P article also reported yesterday the findings of a new National Newspaper Association study looking at readership that found the obvious: Among the top 100 papers, many newspapers are able to reach much more of their market “when their Web users, who shun the print product, are counted in the mix.” The Boston Globe grabs 9 percent more of its market. The Austin American-Statesman and the San Diego Union-Tribune gain roughly 8 percent each.
So if the Times is focused on expanding its market and attracting new readers, which we imagine it must be, it makes little sense to make people pay to hear its most distinctive voices. Blogger and press guru Jay Rosen has made an excellent related point: One of the sales pitches the Times is making to readers is that the new TimesSelect offers “exclusive” access to these columnists and their work. But exclusivity is a nonsensical selling point when it comes to opinion pieces. In fact, a columnist gains value by being widely read, not by being restricted to a select few. “If everyone is reading a columnist, that makes the columnist more of a must-have,” Rosen writes. “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.”
TimesSelect hasn’t failed yet, of course. From an economic standpoint, the jury, it seems, is still out. And even if the initial effort does flop as a business venture, the Times could always set the columnists free and experiment with putting something else behind the paywall. (The Wall Street Journal has a paywall that over 700,000 readers have been willing to buy their way past, so it’s clear that online readers will pay for some things. Maybe, as Rosen hypothesizes, the Times just put the wrong stuff behind its wall. Ironically, the one thing the Journal still offers for free is its opinion columns — the very thing the Times is charging for.)
Even if TimesSelect turns out in retrospect to have been an OWIY (One of the Worst Ideas of the Year) — a distinct possibility — the Times has other options; it can always apply the ever-ornery Mickey Kaus’s suggestion, a new feature called “TimesDelete,” which would work much like the mute button on your TV remote.
“For $19.95 a month, say, TimesDelete’s premium subscribers could vote on one op-ed columnist to take an extended vacation. If more people picked Krugman rather than Brooks, Krugman would get his salary plus a bonus on the condition that he maintain a meaningful silence for several weeks. (Emphasis added.) The race would be tight every month, I should imagine, with Republicans and Democrats trying to outvote each other. But you can’t play if you don’t pay!”
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.