I used to love to read the New York Times Op Ed section, and sometimes I'd even buy the paper to do it, but more often than not, I read it online for free.   About 2 years ago, that changed, when the New York Times decided to put the editorials from it's prized columnists like Paul Krugman, behind a firewall, which you had to pay for to read legally.   Here's the announcement from the New York Times - Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site

TimesSelect didn't work … and people still got to read the columnists they wanted to read from other sources like blog posts that you could find on Technorati, that gave you most if not all the content.

Now, Jeff Jarvis, who I met at AlwaysON NYC earlier this year, wrote a post accouncing the dealth of TimesSelect titled Times deselected … and it did not come a moment too soon.  

"…TimesSelect represented the last gasp of the circulation mentality of news media, the belief that surely consumers would continue to pay for content even as the internet commodified news and — more important — even as the internet revealed that the real value in media is not owning and controlling content or distribution but enabling conversation. "

Good Riddance, it was a stupid idea that no one liked, maybe not even the Times, itself.

"…The financial analyses of TimesSelect were always too simplistic — as if revenue were profit. The Times obituary for its service said that the service collected $49.95 per year or $7.95 per month from 227,000 paying customers at the end — 787,000 total customers, including print subscribers and, recently, academic readers given a free ride. The Times said it brought in $10 million revenue after two years, which sounds damned respectable. But no one ever mentioned the marketing cost to get that revenue. A magazine that costs $50 a year will spend almost that much acquiring subscribers. No one mentioned the extra editorial costs of creating more content to try to make the damned thing special enough to pay for. I never heard any calculation of the customer-service cost of maintaining that many customers, most of whom brought in no revenue. And then there was the question of how much revenue was lost in the Times archives, included in the deal. So though TimesSelect may have brought in revenue at a rate of $10 million at the end, it didn’t earn that much profit. I wonder whether it was profitable at all. "