charge!

so the nytimes is going to start charging for, among other things, opinion columns. i may have to pony up eventually as i'm actually like an opinion columnist. meanwhile i will particularly miss nicholas kristof and david brooks. (i'm kind of tired of maureen dowd's schtick, though i still read her sometimes and sometimes laugh. john tierney is just boring. bob herbert is good and outraged, but the prose is kind of dull and hectoring. friedman is beating a dozen dead horses and is very, very dull these days. frank rich is always worth reading.) but i predict they will eventually have to back off when they lose 3/4 or so of their online readers. i am ambivalent about the move because i would like newspapers to survive and in particular if the op-ed biz were economically viable i might still hope to make a living at it one day (and all of us, secretly, hope to make it onto the times page one day: christ they don't even have one anarchist). on the other hand, free content is surely the wonder of the web, a daily pleasure.