Back in May, when the New York Times announced that its columnists would be going behind a paid wall through a product called TimesSelect, it wasn’t highly thought of. Shortly afterward, the Times‘ Martin Nisenholtz discussed the decision and what was involved. Still, most didn’t take very well to it.
This morning, at least one user is having some trouble using the service - and it’s someone with a print subscription, to boot. It’ll be fascinating to see how this works, as the paper’s columnists are probably some of the most-linked-to articles on the Web right now - or, they were, at least. On Friday, Matt Sheffield gave the gasface to the Times‘ plan, making the point that those potential NYT readers who have no idea who the columnists were before might never know now, if they don’t ever pay for a sub online.
Finally, PaidContent’s Staci Kramer has all kinds of good stuff on the service’s launch, including the fact that advertising will be sold on the columnist pages, according to a spokesperson for the publication - a 180 from what was originally believed.
