Remember when people used to read about and write about what New York Times columnists had to say? Remember all those snarky takedowns of MoDo and The Mustache of Understanding? Remember when people linked approvingly to the last Bob Herbert column, or had something to say about Nick Kristof’s latest offering? I think the paywall killed all that. I know that I don’t read any of their crap anymore. The only one I still care about is David Brooks and that is only because he is an irresistible target. The rest of them have become so irrelevant that they no longer get invited on cable news to pontificate.
Today, the Times counted it as an article-read when I merely looked to see what columns they were running. I won’t be doing that again.
The only one who writes there worth a spit is Krugman, and yes sometimes Bob Herbert (does he write regularly anymore?)
Kristof…I can’t stand him. He is the epitome of liberals I hate. Unless you count Friedman as a liberal, but I wouldn’t.
So in a way, good riddance. the only question is, who takes their place? I never watch the Sunday shows or cable news in general (except Chris Hayes every now and again), so I couldn’t tell you.
You can read Krugman for free, at least I do through the RSS. I might pay a few bucks a month to read his blogging, but I doubt he’d charge, even if the NYT fired him and he had to go indie.
As for Herbert, I specifically subscribed to Demos to read him, which so far has been a quarterly column:
http://www.demos.org/bob-herbert
You have to wonder: is Krugman the NYTimes columnist who people still pay attention because he alone adds actual value to the public conversation?
I also think Nate Silver’s 2012 war against the likes of Noonan and Scarborough did major damage to the punditocracy in a way that we are only beginning to grasp now. A lot of reasonable people who thought those talking heads had access to hidden insights about the political world don’t take them as seriously anymore, and never will again.
The relative integrity and trustworthiness that a public figure – like a newspaper columnist – has is like a currency. They invest that currency in their institutions – like the NYTimes or the Washington Post – over the years. And the broader reputations of their institutions are based on those aggregated investments, plus of course the quality of straight reporting that they do.
The legacy news media outlets have been pissing away the value of their reputational investments for 30+ years now. It’s because they’ve outsourced much of their reporting to corporate PR firms and avoided stories that might hurt their own corporate paymasters. And they’ve allowed the bulk of their opinion makers to become hacks who are just in it for the money. This was a trend that was noticed early on in the film Network, with Faye Dunaway’s character representing the beginning of the corporatization of the news.
The high esteem in which Americans held the legacy institutions has kept them propped up for a long time, despite the gradual decrease in standards. And of course there are many journalists who work in legacy media that still do excellent work: David Remnick, Christine Amanpour, and the young Ezra Klein to name a few.
But outside of the fever-swamps of the right and to a lesser extent the left, the legacy media outlets that have survived to 2013 only have salience because reasonable people still trust them, although not nearly as much as our parents and grandparents did. That trust has to be based on something real: on an institutional spirit of integrity, on quality journalism that answers to no one but the public, and on opinion pages that make the right calls on the big issues. Our trust in them doesn’t and won’t last forever if the institutions don’t actively try to nurture and protect it.
I still value the NYTimes, the New Yorker, and a handful of the other legacy institutions and I hope they fully grasp that lesson before it’s too late. Other outlets like the Washington Post and most broadcast media have, to my mind, clearly passed the point of no return and will soon collapse or only move forward as zombie institutions that few people take seriously.
What do you mean by:
” the Times counted it as an article-read “
You get 10 (I think) free of charge each month. Once you hit the magic number you are prompted to pay subscription in order to read any more.
Right. But normally they don’t count looking at the front-page for Sports or Business or Opinion as an article that you read. Today, they did.
Frank Rich leaving was a real loss.
But you know, getting around the paywall has been really easy up to now. If you look at their home page and see an article you’d like to read, you can just google a few words of the title and nytimes. Clicking on the link directly to the article takes you past the pay wall. I don’t know why there’s such a large loophole, but it’s always worked for me.
Even easier to get around the paywall than that, if you want. Probably most people here know this already but I’ll spell it out anyway. Simply stop your browser from loading after the article has appeared but before the splash screen about the paywall appears. If you don’t quite get the timing right, reload the page and try again.
Getting around the NYT paywall is even easier. Just let the page load. Go to the web address bar. delete everything after .html … then hit enter .. you should be good to go.
What you say actually works to get around the WSJ paywall.
Years ago the OpEd folks were behind a tight TimesSelect paywall. When that didn’t work, they dropped it and more recently went to the 10-free articles model.
http://allthingsd.com/20100120/the-new-york-times-officially-starts-construction-on-its-paywall-mete
red-model-coming-2011/
It’s trivial to get around they NY Times paywall. They don’t even try to make it hard.
1) Do a Google search for a sentence from the piece. Articles read via a Google link don’t count toward your free limit.
or
2) Delete every character between (and including) the “?” and the last character in the NY Times URL and hit Enter. You’ll get the full page without any problems.
You can also do things like deleting cookies (they keep track of your reading via a cookie), but I don’t know as much about those techniques.
I feel a tiny bit guilty about getting around their paywall, but only a tiny bit. If things are free via Google links, I don’t see why I should pay not to adjust a URL. (I usually only need to do so near the end of the month; if their digital subscriptions were more reasonably priced, I wouldn’t bother.)
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
it’s not that I don’t know how to read it. It’s that no one does read it anymore. No one cares.
AFAIK, Krugman’s blog is still often the most popular economics blog by several measures.
Why do you think nobody bothers to read it anymore?
Cheers,
Scott.
that’s his blog. Not opinion pieces.
The Times paywalls content. Whether it’s his blog or his column – they don’t care. It still counts toward the monthly limit.
I’m reading you as saying that people have stopped reading the NYTimes Opinion pieces (blogs, columns, whatever), because of the paywall. I still don’t know why you believe that.
Krugman’s Blog Rank
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
I think people read Krugman because he has a cult following and David Brooks because, well, CARWRECK.
I don’t think people read much Dowd or Friedman or Kristof anymore. I mean, not even to make fun of them.
And they are no longer sought out for comment.
It’s almost like they’ve disappeared from the culture.
http://www.esquire.com/archives/blogs/politics/by_tag/Maureen%20Dowd/15;1
Just a datapoint. 😉
Cheers,
Scott.
The cult following doesn’t account for all of Krgthulu’s audience. There is also all theb frothing-at-the-mouth RWNJ’s trying to “gotcha!” him and stuff like that.
Interesting. I’m pretty sure that using a link from the Google news roundup page does count, unless something’s changed recently.
http://www.labnol.org/internet/nyt-paywall/18992/
That’s from March of last year. I don’t think anything has changed about that since then. More in the NY Times FAQ.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
I have long had a conflicted feeling about paying for content. With so much good stuff available for free, why would I bother? Especially when so much of the paid stuff is tendentious ideological corporate stuff. Freedom of speech almost implies that speech should be free. The internet access to free info has almost become a human right for me.
And yet I acknowledge its costs to provide good content, and I find some of the in-your-face advertising on free sites quite repulsive – not that paywall sites are necessarily better. So it’s a tough call for me. I suspect I would be pragmatic if there was really good content I really wanted. But so far I find I can get by just fine without the few sites which do have paywalls, and I would not grieve too much if those paywall sites disappeared altogether.
After all the “enhanced interrogation” horseshit, I will never give a dime to the NYTimes.
I’ve read only a few selected NYT pieces lately. I usually look elsewhere to other outlets including the LA Times. I went from an actual NYT home subscriber to nearly ignoring it.
I do believe that paywalls have done a service. Exposed the fact that most folks don’t buy news for pundits. Now if the TV networks would only start charging for when their “talent” mouths off opinions we might be able to see the news instead of the spin.
If you want to hear Chuck Todd’s opinion, enter your account number here….let’s marketize them.
“If you want to hear Chuck Todd’s opinion…”
hahahahaha
Though I might consider paying money to not hear Chuck Todd’s opinion.
<Cheezy grin>
10 NYT reads a month is plenty for me.I think a better investment in good reporting is to use the unused NYT/WaPo/etc fund for Pro Publica.
PS — Krugman is irrelevant now? Huh. Hadn’t noticed that.
There’s another trick that appears to get you unlimited access: Set up a delivered-paper subscription. Then set up your digital access for all your devices. (They’ll actually bug you to do this.)
Enjoy the print paper for a week or two, then go online and suspend your subscription for as long as you want. I’ve suspended it for as long as three months and got continuous digital access the whole time.
I will say, they have good news coverage, and good extended magazine articles. I enjoy Krugman. But Dowd and Bruni are both whiny bitches, and the rest are entirely forgettable. If they had Charlie Pierce and Matt Taibbi on the op-ed page, I’d subscribe personally, instead of hijacking the subscription we get at work.
Just delete the NY Times cookie and your article count restarts…
That’s a lot simpler than most people realize. I hadn’t actually fiddled with cookies for a long time – i think I was still using Netscrape when I did that. But on both Safari and IE I found how to do it in less than a minute.
I read the paper edition of the Times these days. For years I read it only sporadically, I was so pissed off at the paper in general. But honestly, I think it’s been improving in both news and editorials since Jill Abramson replaced Bill Keller. We got a subscription a few months ago, and to my surprise, I’m glad we did.
I’m not speaking about the op-ed page. I simply cannot read Brooks; the Moustache I read very rarely. MoDo writes maybe six good pieces a year, if that. But Kristof is worth reading. Krugman of course. And let me put in a word for Gail Collins, whose delicate satire reminds me of the long-missed Russell Baker.
Certainly describes me. I used to read Krugman and Herbert all the time, but when the Paywall came, my reaction was, “well, screw that,” and I drifted into other areas of the Web, got deeper into the blogs, and journalism-based sites like TPM.
I used to read Froomkin when he was at WaPo, and I read Charles M. Blow and Charles Pierce occasionally, but for the most part, the Paywall completely altered my habit of reading mainly op-eds to reading almost none at all. I don’t even read Krugman these days unless a column gets flagged as particularly noteworthy.