The Times, it is a-changin'

Beginning this week, as a new way to meet the challenge of declining ad revenue faced by newspapers nationally, the NYTimes is moving much of its online content, including the opinion columnists, plus their news tracking feature, behind a $49/year firewall called Times Select.

Will the end of the universe be blogged?

The first response of the blog world to this move was, perhaps not surprisingly, to claim that the Times is taking itself out of the national conversation by making it impossible for blogs to link to it for free anymore. That's a bit of a stretch, I think.

The whole thing seems a little like the way Douglas Adams once referred to the idea of a professional philosophers' strike--it's not terribly clear who's going to be inconvenienced by it.

First, at least for now, much of the columnists' work is redistributed by other sites anyway (case in point).

Further--and again, at least for now--it appears a determined non-payer can get past the firewall to the Times Select material. (Ditto their archived material.)

And there's another question: Might life still be somehow livable without access to the Times' columnists? Slate invited readers to indicate how much of a hypothetical $25 they would be willing to allocate to each of the various Times opinion writers. The amusing results are here.

Blogging and influence

Salon.com's Daou Report has an interesting piece this week on the power that the blog world does--and doesn't--have. (The original is available through Premium access here, or you can wade your way through some ads for a one-time view. It's worth the bother. But if you simply can't cough up for a Salon Premium membership [it's one of the few online subscriptions I have], you can read a decent summary with excerpts at DailyKOS.)

The gist of Daou's article is that "conventional wisdom"--the free-floating crap game of truisms of the moment, plus the relative priority different topics get on the public agenda--is forged by the ongoing relationship of three realms: Blogging/netroots, the mainstream media, and political leadership.

The logic of it's fairly simple: The wholly unworthy "Swiftboat Veterans" story got traction last year because the conservative blogs kept it alive, the media covered it (either as straight news or as a "story about the story"--either serving the purpose), and the right wing talking heads circulated and recirculated the best memes on the chat shows. From the left, synergy among the same three factors has gone a long way toward turning the Bush Administration's lackadaisical and cynical response to Hurricane Katrina into a perfect storm of bad press and sinking poll numbers.

Oregonian angle, Part 1: The Oregonian has made its own attempt to fight the industry-wide decline in readership with a trumpeted makeover, under the digital-age-sounding buzz phrase "High Definition News." I'm not much impressed; the two-page Opinion spread this morning looks a lot like the full-page feature they used to run with specially written news for beginning readers. Lots of bare space and more pictures. PDX Media Insider agrees. And there's nothing to link to on this by way of illustration, since the makeover includes nothing to improve their clunky web site.

Oregonian angle, Part 2: According to Technorati.com, my own humble contribution to the national conversation is currently ranked 330,956th out of the 17.5 million blogs it tracks.

330,956th?? Woo-hoo! Hey, Number 330,957--in your face!