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Times Select Free for Education Users: Backing Off Pay-Per-View?

Ad Age: TimesSelect Free for College Students — and Graduates? I assume that grads will do the honest thing and not abuse their .edu addresses, but I also wonder if this is a bit like Microsoft’s “Student & Teacher” editions of software that are way, way cheaper than the versions for everyone else — and which Microsoft doesn’t police at all.

Times Select was always a bad idea, not because the paper was trying to make some money off its Web version but because it essentially removed some of the most important writers from the global conversation place. The columnists deserved better, but more importantly the audience deserved to have those writers in the mix.

Contrast Times Select to the Wall Street Journal’s approach, which is to charge for the news (well, most of it) and put the opinions into the public arena. Guess which institution now has vastly greater reach in the marketplace of ideas?

3 Comments on “Times Select Free for Education Users: Backing Off Pay-Per-View?”

  1. #1 Arest
    on Mar 18th, 2007 at 7:23 pm

    Times Select was always a bad idea +1.

  2. #2 Jon Garfunkel
    on Mar 21st, 2007 at 11:28 pm

    Oh boy. I am still looking for proof of this “removing from the global conversation.” No one has ever put forth data behind this. but it sounds good!
    Check out these numbers. Maureen Dowd still trumps Peggy Noonan– not to mention Ellen Goodman, who’s syndicated in 440 newspapers.

    What is in the “global conversation” and what people blog about and what people read and people should care about may be interrelated, though it’s fallacy to assume they should all be the same. I don’t have the model for it yet. (but if I were in a media studies program full-time, I might)

  3. #3 Dan Kennedy
    on Mar 24th, 2007 at 5:56 pm

    “Guess which institution now has vastly greater reach in the marketplace of ideas?”

    Uh, that would be the New York Times.