I just heard (!) that the Times is going to start charging $50/year to read its op-ed columnists. (That will also get you access to their archives.) I feel their pain, even as I think it’s the wrong decision.

The Times is watching its value erode. Electronic distribution is only going to become a bigger part of the picture, its readership is exulting in the exposes of the failures of the MSM to provide full and accurate coverage — the real story about the Newsweek brouhaha is why we are so eager to hear about ways the MSM is failing — and the authority of The Times is being challenged by a new news architecture that denies the necessity of having gatekeepers at all. In this face of all this confusion, the Times has made some smart moves, including giving a backdoor to permalinks to its articles and moving towards dynamically building “topic pages” that aggregate information.

This new move, however, is the salmon trying to swim up a perpendicular waterfall. By making us pay to read Krugman, Friedman, et al., the Times asserts the value of its Big Fish experts against the blogging plankton. But what they’re actually doing is withdrawing the authority that those experts were earning in the blogosphere through the power of their speech. Krugman, for example, is 10 times more important as a voice on the Web than as Rapunzel locked in a tower.

Not everything has to be free, and I’m all in favor of The Times making money. But not at the cost of its value. With this move, the Paper of Record is on its way to becoming the Paper of What-Ever-Happened-To? [Technorati tags: nytimes msm]

Ross Mayfield in the comments makes the excellent point that we’re likely to see columnists become bloggers in order to rejoin the fray. We can only hope.

Meanwhile, Joi is worrying that his blog has changed focus and mood without him being aware of it. Rebecca does some excellent bucking up. Here’s mine: Yo, Joi! Your blog reflects you and you don’t ever have to worry about being boring. You’re just otherly interesting. So, buck up, muh friend!

Categories: Uncategorized dw