Irrational Exuberance Over Free 'Times'

The blogosphere is in ecstasies over the demise of TimesSelect, The New York Times's subscriber-only premium content program. Everyone from Jeff Jarvis to Jay Rosen to our own Felix Salmon seems to think it heralds the end, once and for all, of attempts to charge for online content. From here on in, it's all free, baby.

Me, I'm not so sure. TimesSelect was hardly the perfect test case for premium content because the Times picked the stupidest possible part of its offerings to charge for. There is nothing as easy to come by on the web as opinion. Can't read Maureen Dowd or Frank Rich? Oh well, I guess you'll have to settle for Josh Marshall, Andrew Sullivan or one of the Huffington Post's 6,000 bloggers. (Jarvis has a great point about why the Times opted to wall off its columnists: "Advertisers buy ads in food and travel but not opinion sections; there is essentially no endemic advertising for blather.")

If The Wall Street Journal follows through on Rupert Murdoch's musings and drops its subscription model, that would be a much more convincing development. But even in that instance, I still think a blanket statement like Jarvis's "Content is now and forever free" is taking it a little far. Information may want to be free, but content is something else. Are all the triumphalists ready to rule out the possibility that, somewhere down the road, someone will replicate what HBO did in television, creating programming so good people will be willing to pay for a commodity they were used to getting gratis?