The NYT is "contributing to the digital divide. Absolutely. No question about it."

Said Rush Limbaugh yesterday, at the end of a rant that began by noting that Bob Herbert is leaving the NYT, "with the intent" — in Herbert's words — "of writing more expansively and more aggressively about the injustices visited on working people, the poor and the many others in our society who find themselves on the wrong side of power."

Eventually, after explaining for the 5,000th time that the real cause of poverty is liberalism, Rush got to the subject of the new New York Times pay wall, which means that "The poor will no longer be able to read the New York Times."

It's $35 a month to read their website. Bob Herbert is quitting. Now, some enterprising hackers have found four lines of JavaScript to be able to beat the pay wall. The New York Times spent tens of millions of dollars establishing their pay wall, tens of millions of dollars to pay and keep people from busting it, and four lines of JavaScript have been written that totally bust the pay wall. But the poor don't even know what JavaScript is, so the poor will not even be able to read. 

Well, at least the young/cool people will be able to bypass the pay wall. Maybe that's what the NYT intended. They want their regular home-delivery subscribers to feel they're getting something special and forestall the abandonment of home delivery as people migrate to the internet. (That's what happened to me. I paid for home delivery from 1984 to about 2006, at which point, I noticed I'd been leaving the paper-paper folded up and unread, while I read and wrote on line.) I'm sure some on-line-only readers will pay to get through the wall, and the NYT will make some money from them. Maybe it's worth doing. But I suspect the Times — unless it's a complete idiot — has planned all along for people to work around the wall, because otherwise the drop-off in readership will be horrendous. I think they're hoping to rake in money from a subset of readers while providing free access for anyone who figures out how to get around it and isn't hyper-moral about such things.

James Taranto points to the @freeNYTimes Twitter feed, which you can follow to pick up links to all the new items in the NYT. That's not even bypassing the policy. It was already in the policy that you could get in free if you had a referring link. So there's a referring link for every single thing. It's an uglier point of entry than the front page at the NYT website, which is unfortunate, but not unfortunate enough to make me pay $35 a month for what I've gotten free for years. Now, readers coming over from Twitter will be consuming one of their 20 free page views that the Times gives us each month. I have quit linking to the NYT myself because I feel bad about forcing people to use up their free reads. If there's some news event I want to write about, I start at the Washington Post or some other standard place instead of the NYT. How about all those interesting extra things the NYT talks about — science, culture, commentary? I'm not seeing them, because I'm not looking there anymore. I know I'm missing stuff, but I'm finding other things elsewhere — all because the links consume the free 20!

Taranto has this from the Times Publisher Pinch Sulzburger:

"Can people go around the system? The answer is yes. There are going to be ways... Just as if you run down Sixth Avenue right now and you pass a newsstand and grab the paper and keep running you can actually get the Times free." Oh, so we're not savvy Web users, we're all thieves.

"Is it going to be done by the kind of people who value the quality of The New York Times reporting and opinion and analysis? No... I don't think so. It'll be mostly high-school kids and people who are out of work."

Ha ha. The kind of people.... How ineffably snooty! Somebody tell Bob Herbert! People who are out of work. Those low-quality people! Note that he isn't saying the Times cares about poor people and intends to let them in free. It's saying losers like that don't want to read the NYT anyway. It's only the people who will pay who are wanted in the first place.

What an embarrassing disaster!

Suddenly, I love the NYT pay scheme!

"If you are coming to NYTimes.com from another Web site and it brings you to our site to view an article, you will have access to that article and it will not count toward your allotment of free ones."

Wow! Fabulous! I certainly am willing to subscribe to the NYT myself. My problem was that I want to read things I can blog and I don't want to link to things that my readers will need to pay for. But if my link magically makes the article free, then the paid NYT will be better for me. This blog will function as a portal to the free NYT.

"Sealing an online product off from the core online experience seems to me to be a medium at war with itself and a business not fully aware of the actual product it is creating."

"[The New York Times is] having a hell of a time monetizing [the web] because it is too vast, too borderless, too fluid to carve out property on it. It's like trying to make a profit in a communist state.... [Bloggers have] feel optimistic... because we've tried to take advantage of this new dimension, by being a totally open source portal, a hub, a node of conversation and argument. This brings in readers and advertizers. Are the advertizers enough to finance a news organization? Not yet, and maybe never.... The NYT may be smart in doing what it's doing... but it may lead to even greater traffic for blogs that can merely cite or summarize NYT pieces and have small excerpts as fair use as well..."

So writes Andrew Sullivan, who seems to be overcorrecting his tendency toward British spelling.

Intent on charging for access — or just clueless — the New York Times fails to link to its own wonderfully rich archive.

I was reading the obituary for Jean Delannoy, the French film director who died on Wednesday at the age of 100. I didn't remember the name, though I see he directed the Anthony Quinn/Gina Lollobrigida version of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," which I loved when I was a teenager.



Yeah, it's not very good, but it really did have a very deep emotional impact on me. The old Charles Laughton version is so much better:



But let me get to my point. I learn from the obit that Delannoy was the sort of director that the French New Wave directors were rebelling against:

Mr. Delannoy had worked in the film industry for two decades when, in 1954, François Truffaut, then a 21-year-old critic for the film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, wrote his controversial article “A Certain Trend in French Film.”

In the article Truffaut attacked France’s commercial cinema and its so-called tradition of quality, as exemplified by Mr. Delannoy and certain colleagues, and advocated in its place auteurism, a new, director-centered filmmaking style, which Truffaut came to embrace as a filmmaker. Established French directors, Truffaut wrote, had failed to express their personalities or espouse a worldview. He said that the worst of Jean Renoir’s movies would always be more interesting than the best of Mr. Delannoy’s.

Stung, Mr. Delannoy responded by letter, calling the criticism “so low that I have never encountered anything like it in my 20 years in the profession.” He believed that a director’s job was to realize the work of the scriptwriters; Truffaut considered that attitude contemptuous of film as an art form.

Jean-Luc Godard shared Truffaut’s opinion, once suggesting that when Mr. Delannoy carried a briefcase to the studio, he might as well be going to an insurance office.

This is important!

Mr. Delannoy responded by writing an article for The New York Times. The film industry, he wrote, was “dying of infantilism.”

Wait! He responded by writing an article for The New York Times?! Where is the link?!!!

Now, I've had a little side project — which, admittedly, I've been ignoring for the last week or so — where I blog from the NYT archive for a date in the past as if I were blogging the news today. And I've struggled with the way the Times limits access to the archive for the years 1923 to 1986). Efforts to limit access to the current issue — the "TimesSelect" program — failed. But the partly closed historical archive remains. I'd love to be able to link to the old articles freely. They can't be getting much traffic. Why not let them burst out to a big audience when someone wants to talk about something, like what Jean Delannoy wrote in 1952 about the French New Wave?

The Times itself should be sending us back into its archive. It's boneheaded not to link to the old article by Delannoy!

So I'll have to be the one to go back and dig it out for you. It's here if you want to pay for access (or have an educational account and can get to 100 articles a month). Now, I'm reading the article, and it doesn't seem to be much of a response to Truffaut:

[T]he torture of the cinema in the world is, for the most part, due to the tightening of censorship....

The censors act in good faith, in the name of morality. But what is curious is that morality is not the same in one country as another....

All censorships are mistaken because they judge on the basis of pre-established criteria and not on the basis of intention. First and foremost, a film affects the understanding of an audience.... What the public looks for in the dimmed rooms is shocks, and emotions. Films that call upon the intelligence are rare and have only limited success....

He expresses concern that the movie "Savage Triangle" will be shown in New York for adults only.

[I]f I had a boy of 14, I would prefer him to get to know some "savage boys" as the one in the film, rather than to nourish himself solely on the violence of Robin Hood with his special interpretation of justice, or the ideas he has on religion, in the person of Friar Tuck, the monk with the cudgel who supports him.

The cinema is dying of infantilism. Will censorship finish the job?

One reason not to link to the archive — a terrible reason — is that the old articles don't actually support the point you are citing them for! Delannoy isn't responding to Truffaut here. He's pissed off at censors (and Robin Hood).

ADDED: There is a short paragraph that appears between the discussion of Truffaut and the reference to Delannoy's old article:

Mr. Delannoy had earlier had his own complaints about the industry, partly because of censorship. “L’Éternel Retour” (“The Eternal Return”), a retelling of the Tristan and Isolde story, was condemned by the Legion of Decency in 1948. “Le Garçon Sauvage” (“The Wild Boy,” released in the United States in 1952 as “Savage Triangle”), the story of a Marseilles prostitute and her son, also ran afoul of censors.

The old article did support that paragraph. I incorrectly assumed that the new paragraph, which began "Mr. Delannoy responded by writing an article for The New York Times," referred back to the Truffaut criticism. 

"I am against corporations; ain't going to give them any powers."/"The corporations — they want this? What will they pay for it?"

Teddy Roosevelt condemns the 2 extremes — in the year that blog forgot: 1899.

Also noted today:

Queen Victoria pats a terrier.

And:

Reverend W.W. Reynolds wrings his ... hands over "women of refinement and exquisite moral training addicted to the use of the bicycle."

ADDED: Fortunately, 1899 is one of the years in the NYT archive that you can access without paying (or having an educational account), so everyone will be able to read the underlying news stories for free.

I'm still trying to figure out the best way to deal with the problem of the TimesSelect wall that blocks the middle section of the 100 years I'm blogging in my new side project The Time That Blog Forgot. I've thought of a few ideas:

1. Use a style of blogging that makes consulting the underlying article unimportant. You'll know there is an article supporting the post, but you won't need to read it.

2. Try to get the NYT to give me a way to link that bypasses the system they have in place. And, by the way, why do they have this system? How much money can they make off the old archive? How can it be worth the annoyance and the ill will that is created? Also, they need to replace the PDFs with text files. I know they have the text on line somehow, because when I Google words from the center of the article, it comes up first.

3. Find other historical archives that can be searched by the day and year.

Killing TimesSelect.

Yay!

The New York Times is poised to stop charging readers for online access to its Op-Ed columnists and other content, The Post has learned....

While other online publications were abandoning subscriptions, the Times took the opposite approach in 2005 and began charging for access to well-known writers, including Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Thomas L. Friedman.

The decision, which also walled off access to archives and other content, was controversial almost from the start, with some of the paper's own columnists complaining that it limited their Web readership.

It was always such a bad idea. Why did they even persist this long? It's been so annoying not to be able to link to things, and I even cut down on reading the things I couldn't link to. It was particularly absurd that they put their bloggers behind the wall. But the ultimate absurdity for me was writing a guest column and not being able to link to my own column.