A Stitch in Haste

In case you were wondering, I will of course not be paying money to read Paul Krugman.

I won't even pay to read John Tierney.

My aggregator is already overflowing with free content.

It wouldn't surprise me if The New York Times eventually scraps "TimesSelect." I don't mean this as a cheap shot, but $49.95 just to read the Op-Ed pages and have access to the archives is ludicrous. The Wall Street Journal is $99 per year, but for everything, including Barron's and OpinionJournal. That's a bargain.

For Discussion: Will TimesSelect fail, and if so, after how long?

POST SCRIPT: For those who don't understand the headline of this post, see here.

TimesSelect, R.I.P.

I can't wait.

And like many others, I saw it coming.

---

The humiliating failure of TimesSelect belies the pompous view that journalists — and especially commentators — should be deemed "above" the market, the same gobbledygook that mediocre-at-best artists blather. If there had been incremental value to newspaper punditry, then people would have been willing to pay an incremental price for it, just as they might be willing to pay for a Maureen Dowd speech or a Thomas Friedman book.

Market equilibria (i.e., prices and outputs determined by supply and demand) reflect aggregate, consensus views of worth. By the same token, entrepreneurial failures reflect not the pedestrianism of consumers, but the obliviousness of producers. In capitalism, declaring that "We're not wrong, the market is wrong..." is the height of delusional hubris.

Stated differently: The converse of "you get what you pay for" is also true: You have to give what you charge for. If you can't deliver, then blame yourself and not your customers.

---

On a tangent: The consensus "next question" is whether a post-Murdoch Wall Street Journal will go "free online." Meanwhile, am I the only person who suspects that Murdoch bought Dow Jones not to acquire the Wall Street Journal at all, but rather the Dow Jones Newswire? It was, possibly, the only way for Fox News to break into the "real-time, cyber-friendly" newsfeed business: Reuters is too big while the Associated Press (a cooperative) and Bloomberg News (an L.P.) are not for sale. Even at the arguably inflated price News Corp paid for Dow Jones, it might still have been cheaper than building a newsfeed from scratch the way it built a fourth network. I would be totally unsurprised to see NewsCorp sell off the Journal to some other publishing house such as Gannett (publisher of USA Today). I'd settle for selling off James Taranto. Stay tuned...

---

UPDATE: Welcome Tim Harford readers! Please note the comment that I posted in response to his piece —

Just to be clear, my contempt was for the notion that TimesSelect only applied (for the most part) to the OpEd pages and not the entire publication. I myself am a loyal subscriber to the Wall Street Journal online edition — at least for now.

It is not per se irrational to pay money to access the entire New York Times online. It is per se irrational, however, to pay money to read Paul Krugman.