Good Bye Gray Lady

Well it's official:

Come Monday, Sept. 19, fans of New York Times columnists Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, and David Brooks will have to break out their credit cards. Sept. 19 is the launch date of TimesSelect, a new subscription service designed to diversify the newspaper's revenue stream beyond traditional Web site advertising.

The popular Op-Ed columnists are the main selling point behind the $49.95 a year subscription.

We have already discovered that because of "reporters" like Judith Miller nothing on the news pages of the Times can be trusted. Now we will have to pay to read the only thing that still makes the paper worth while, the columnists.

I agree with Joe Gandelman:

Maybe this will even help bloggers get over their Times Addiction and explore websits of papers that also have great analysis and reporting such as The Christian Science Monitor and USA Today.

Life can go on without some of your fine columnists, and we suspect this move means you're shooting yourselves in the foot (or a bit lower, to the back, but just turn the other cheek when the pain hits). This just means fewer quotes, fewer links — fewer people who don't live in New York reading your newspaper.

Like Joe, I won't pay but I will link to "illegal" mirror sites of Krugman etc.

Note
I will leave The New York Times link on the sidebar but as a commentary of my own it has a line through it.