On Monday, the New York Times announced that it would proceed with the subscription service it had been investigating recently, one that carries a cost of $49.95 annually - it's been named TimesSelect. While the subscription, which is set to begin in September, will open up the Times' archives (currently available on a fee basis) to all who sign on, it will close the doors to some of the more popular (especially with bloggers) features on the site, namely the op-ed columnist pages. As I suggested on May 3, "Publications are going to be moving to either a heavier reliance on advertising or some sort of online subscription service as print distribution declines, and there is no reason they shouldn't be able to recoup some of the cost of hosting that data - on a constantly live basis - from the reader." That being said, my prediction was leaning more towards the archived portion of the site, not new items.

While it's not surprising that newer features such as special audio/visual pieces and the ability to see articles before they hit the print edition ("Ahead of the Times," they're calling it) will be part of a paid service, dropping columnists and op-eds into the same bucket might be a mistake. Sure, some who truly want to read Frank Rich, Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, George Vecsey and others will either stick to the print edition or will sign on to the service, but this feels like a reversal of what the Wall Street Journal is currently going through, where the online service is gaining steam with users by offering up free content here and there to entice new subscriptions. In this case, taking something "away" that was previously free to everyone online and placing a value on it is going to be hard to justify in all cases.

Corante's Ernest Miller says that this is like the NYT proclaiming "We Don't Want People to Read Our Op-Ed Columnists," while Motley Fool's Alyce Lomax seems to think that the "mix of paid and free content...could very well be fruitful." Regardless of the stack of ticked off bloggers that aren't going to be able to Fisk every column link to the Times' op-eds, the paper will have to prove that the loss of revenue from a CPM standpoint on those particular pages will be offset by all the $49.95 subscriptions that come in.