Soccer Dad

You don't need a college education to get times select

... but it pays to be well read.

So the NY Times iis throwing in the towel on Times Select. According to an article in Ad Age, the Times is planning to extend free use of Times Select to anyone with a .edu e-mail address.

"While this is obviously an attempt to get college students hooked on a national newspaper, I think the unintended result will be that college grads like me start giving the $40/year to their alumni association," one blogger wrote on Due Torre. "I'll get a couple of decent lectures, a couple of mediocre advertisements, a free .edu email address and a TimesSelect subscription to boot."

Ad Age continues

Mickey Kaus from Slate linked to that post, saying The Times might not even mind if every college grad in the world started reading TimesSelect without paying.

"For one thing, it will make Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd happy. (They'll get bigger audiences.)" Mr. Kaus wrote. "For another, it gives the paper a graceful way to effectively abandon its whole ill-conceived pay-for-opinions plan while maintaining it as a formal fiction -- just as Bed, Bath & Beyond maintains the fiction that you only get 20% off if you have a coupon (even as it distributes coupons so freely that basically everyone has four or five lying on the floor of their car)."

(via memeorandum)

However, as I've written before all you need to access the online version of the newspaper is a library card in many states. In Maryland for example, if you have a library card you can go to the website of the jurisdiction and check out the Newspaper and Magazine database. The Times only goes back to 2000, the Washington Post goes back even further. You can access articles from the major newsmagazines and even magazines like the New Republic or Commentary. The libraries paid for access to those databases, as a resident of your state your entitled to access the databases.

There are some limitations. Usually there's a day or two lag (or issue or two lag in case of weekly or monthly periodicals.) Also someitmes the access is restricted to the libraries themselves. (To access the NY Times archives in LA you need to be physically in the library. Bergen County NJ doesn't seem to allow access to the databases from home. I don't know if that's the case for all of New Jersey.)

Outside the Beltway writes:

The NYT has decided to make “TimesSelect,” their system of putting their least essential content behind a subscription wall so bloggers won’t read and comment on it, free to university students and faculty. Since I am no longer a member of either of those groups, I’m still out of luck. Or in luck, I can’t decide.

If he wishes to participate, he probably can via his library card. Of course since it's the "least essential content" perhaps he won't avail himself of this opportunity.

Blogdigger tags: Media, New York Times, Times Select.