the big payback!

no i'm not talking about the godfather of soul, the hardest workin' man in all of show bid-nez

i'm talking about the NEW YORK TIMES

'NY Times' Introduces New 'Pay' Service Today: Reader Reaction Awaited

By Greg Mitchell Published: September 18, 2005 11:35 PM ET
NEW YORK The New York Times unveiled its great pay experiment Sunday night, when it unveiled TimesSelect and started putting its popular opinion and sports columnists behind the firewall.No doubt thousands have already visited the newspaper’s site and clicked on, for example, the link to the new Paul Krugman column, to find just the title, “Tragedy in Black and White,” and one sentence from his column, then the following: “To continue reading this article, you must be a subscriber to TimesSelect.”Click on the Times Select button and you find that if you subscribe to the paper, or to its International Herald Tribune (three times a week or more) then you can still get Krugman and the other columnists online for free. Otherwise, you have to have to pay $7.95 a month.But to break you in easily—-the paper is offering a 14-day free trial.The question, of course, remains: how quickly, and how many, other Web editors and bloggers will copy the columns in question and put them up on their own sites, daring the Times to sue them. One of the first to put up most of Krugman's column was http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/.The second op-ed columnist behind the firewall for Monday is Bob Herbert. His column is titled “Good Grief” and the one sentence gift is: “The country has put its faith in President Bush many times before, and come up empty.”Joining Krugman and Herbert in the pay-for-play zone are sports columnists Dave Anderson (writing about the football Jets' need for a new stadium) and William Rhoden, who contributes not one but two columns (on the trauma of the Yankees possibly not making the playoffs this year and a rocky road ahead for the Jets on the field)................