Who pays extra to read Maureen Dowd and David Brooks?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on June 08, 2006

Tim Porter defends The New York Times for putting its opinion columnists (and archives) behind a paid wall, the so-called Times Select. His point: If newspapers have online production that readers are willing to pay for it, monetize it. Porter’s responding to a post from PBS’s Mark Glaser, in which he calls on the Times to tear down its subscription “wall.”

Porter notes that the Times makes millions of dollars with Times Select (The exact number is disputed), and that any reader who knows how to use a blog search engine can find copies of the articles behind the wall. That answers a long-standing question for me. I couldn’t figure out why the leading blog searches were for Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd et al. Now I see that the traffic that used to go to the Times now takes a detour to the blogs.