Thursday, September 20, 2007

Goodbye, TimesSelect. Hello, Tesla!

At the stroke of midnight on Wednesday, the New York Times discontinued their TimesSelect subscription program, and in so doing made enormous tracts of their archives, which go back a century and a half, available for free to anyone with web access. (Previously, only print subscribers and some students and educators enjoyed this privilege.) At this point, archival material from 1851 to 1922 is free; and so is material from 1987 to the present. "There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986," the Times reports, "and some will be free." Go figure.

Some predict that this move by the Times marks the demise of the pay-for-content model still favored by The Wall Street Journa and a steadily dwindling number of other print periodicals. Which is fascinating, but... FREE STUFF! The blogosphere is excited.

TechCrunch reader Rollo immediately built RSS feeds of Thomas Friedman's and Paul Krugman's Times columns.

"Just look at all the tasty 1900s Nikola Tesla goodness buried in the NYT archive," says Snarkmarket reader Kiki.

Jason Kottke, of the popular blog Kottke.org, posted links to "some of the more notable items that the non-subscriber has been missing." These include: an early report of Lincoln's assassination ("The President Still Alive at Last Accounts"); a report on Custer's Last Stand; the Times's first mention of television -- which, in 1907, was still just an interesting idea; and The first mention of the World Wide Web in the Times. The purpose of the Web, according to this February 1993 article, is to make available "physicists' research from many locations."

Of course, now we realize that the Web had at least one other purpose: To make available everything ever published in the Times. Unless it was published between 1923-1986.

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 07:49 AM

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