I’m not going to make headline news when I blog about the New York Times content policy. The way it works, only registered users can read new articles, and after a while articles move to the archive where only NYT subscribers can access them. As a result, I very rarely link to NYT articles, and only after I’ve considered the downside of annoying my readers with registration-required content and broken links.
Last week the NYT went one step further (or backwards, as the case may be) and restricted op-ed pieces to subscribers only. It’s content that I will never get to read, never get to link to, I probably wouldn’t even know it exists. I don’t know if the NYT stands to gain, but I do know op-ed contributors stand to lose by becoming irrelevant on the Net.
The news hit the blogsphere, and soon enough a lot of bandwidth was spent opinionating about access to other people’s opinions. It was John Battelle’s blog where I found this sentence, and it immediately caught my attention:
They are keeping most of the site free, after all, and asking that people pay for the stuff that has proven to be the most valuable - folks’ opinions.
Folks’ opinions is something I’ve been wrapping my head around during the past few weeks, it’s almost an obsession of mine, and what this project is all about. Not NYT co-ed contributors, but rather ordinary people like you and me who have interesting opinions to share, but not the forum (or time or moeny) to bring it to the front. Or worse, we have forums where our opinion is valued, but we don’t get to own it or take credit for it. That has to change.
