A Great Paper

Sad day! The era of getting to read respected newspapers for free on the internet is coming to a close. It started with the Gray(ey?) Lady herself creating the TimesSelect membership.

It boils down to costing $7.95 per month or $49.95 per year. In order to get the Editorials, certain columnists, and features you must be a TimesSelect member to access them over the web.

Now I love the NY-Times and perhaps I will breakdown and pay for it someday, but the taste of "free" will take a while to leave my mouth. You can still access a lot of the Times for free on the site, just not the parts that I checked everyday. My next fear (slight overstatement) is that good Podcasts will go the paid subscription route as well.

Speaking of the NY-Times why is it that conservatives and Republicans fear the Times so much. Totally irrational. I love it when pundits on the right rail against the great media conspiracy out there and hold up the Times as the Moses of the group. It makes them look silly. Especially when they say that Fox News isn't slanted but actually 'Fair and Balanced'. To be fair it also bothers me when "Air America" types disavow any perspective given through Fox News. That's equally annoying.

Hear me, I know that the NYT brings a New York City kind of slant to things in the world, which tends to be much more liberal than say Highland Park in Dallas. The Executive Editor, Bill Keller admitted as much and more in his memo (.pdf) sent to the news room at the Times headquarters. In it he states:

"...even sophisticated readers of The New York Times sometimes find it hard to distinguish between news coverage and commentary in our pages. We should make the distinction [between news and opinion] as clear as possible. Our news coverage needs to embrace unorthodox views and contrarian opinions and to portray lives both more radical and more conservative than those most of us experience. We need to listen carefully to colleagues who are at home in realms that are not familiar to most of us."

Good for you Mr. Keller. Other papers bring their own slant to news as well it's not just the NY-Times. For instance the Wall Street Journal brings a business slant to the way it views world events which causes it to be a little more conservative, but it's still a respected newspaper. The Washington Post is slanted towards the conservative end of the spectrum.

I am not a Journalist I don't even have good grammar, but I think I can recognize a good newspaper and the Times is one. Republicans that blame negative press on liberal bias make it appear like they are afraid to engage in the issues that the NYT reporters and editorialists report on. Instead, people who shout "you can't trust the NYT, they're liberal" just manage to look like they are on a playground name calling, taking their ball, and going home.

** Follow Up **
Taken from Slate.com in the Kausfiles article.

Here are three public-spirited reasons to revel in the NYT's suffering:
1) The NYT is characteristically arrogant in assuming that its opinion writers are well read because they're so much smarter and better than the hundreds of thousands of competing opinion writers on the Web, as opposed to because as NYT columnists they are what everyone thinks everyone else reads. It will be a blow for social equality if this near-Herrnsteinian assumption gets punctured;
2) The nation's most important paper, as noted frequently in this space, has become smug and self-confident in its biases under its current publisher, Mr. Sulzberger. He inherited his positon, but it's not impossible for him to lose it (there was talk of that during the Jayson Blair scandal). If he did, maybe the paper would become less smug and self-confident in its biases;
3) Public debate seems to work faster and better when opinion and argument is available freely and universally. Paid content won't kill democracy; it didn't before the Web. But the free content/advertising model for making money--at least when it comes to opinion journalism--is better for democracy.]