New York Times to end paid Internet service

I am glad that the New York Times has finally come to its senses (http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSWEN101120070918?feedType=RSS&feedName=internetNews&rpc=22&sp=true). While I enjoy many of the Times columnists, I refused to pay for opinions when I could get so many other views for free (and often get the Times columns a few days later in other publications. The blogosphere is changing how people get both the news and commentary. Here's some of the Reuters story:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Times Co said on Monday it will end its paid TimesSelect Web service and make most of its Web site available for free in the hopes of attracting more readers and higher advertising revenue. TimesSelect will shut down on Wednesday, two years after the Times launched it, which charges subscribers $7.95 a month or $49.95 a year to read articles by columnists such as Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman.

The trademark orange "T's" marking premium articles will begin disappearing Tuesday night, said the Web site's Vice President and General Manager Vivian Schiller. The move is an acknowledgment by The Times that making Web site visitors pay for content would not bring in as much money as making it available for free and supporting it with advertising.

Figuring out how to increase online revenue is crucial to the Times and other U.S. newspaper publishers, which are struggling with a drop in advertising sales and paying subscribers as more readers move online. "Of course, everything on the Web is free, so it's understandable why they would want to do that," said Alan Mutter a former editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and proprietor of a blog about the Internet and the news business called Reflections of a Newsosaur.
"The more page views you have, the more you can sell," he said. "In the immediate moment it's a perfectly good idea."

Bush Nominee’s Abnormal Views

The main editorial in today's New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/opinion/10tue1.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) urges the U. S. Senate to vote "No" on Chimperator Bush's nominee for Surgeon General. I have highlighted the strong homophobia of the nominee in prior posts and think him totally unqualified due to his Christianist views. Portions of the Times editorial are as follows:

The Senate Health Committee will have to dig beneath the surface on Thursday to consider the nomination of Dr. James Holsinger to be surgeon general. Dr. Holsinger has high-level experience as a health administrator, but there are disturbing indications that he is prejudiced against homosexuals.

His strongest statement on homosexuality can be found in a murky, loosely reasoned paper that he wrote for a church committee in 1991. Titled “Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality,” the paper purported to be a scientific and medical review. It argued that gay sex was abnormal on anatomical and physiological grounds and unhealthy, in that anal sex can lead to rectal injuries and sexually transmitted diseases. Dr. Holsinger did not brand the large number of heterosexual women who engage in anal sex as abnormal, failed to acknowledge the huge burden of disease spread heterosexually and implied that women are more likely than men to avoid injuries with generous lubrication.

The Bush administration says the white paper reflected the scientific understanding of the time, but it reads like a veneer of science cloaking an aversion to homosexuality. The committee should examine whether Dr. Holsinger cherry-picked the literature or represented it objectively. Most important, it must determine whether Dr. Holsinger holds these benighted views today. The Senate should not confirm a surgeon general who considers practicing homosexuals abnormal and diseased.

While I applaud the Time's postion against Holsinger, Michelangelo Signorile (http://signorile2003.blogspot.com/2007/07/practicing-homosexuals-in-editorial.html) and John Aravosis (http://www.americablog.com/2007/07/nyt-editorial-writes-about-practicing.html) have both taken the Times to task for using the term "practicing homosexuals" and for good reason. As Signorile states:

"Just by using that term, the editorial undermines the very point it is trying to make. Holsinger has been attacked for supporting a church that reportedly believes in "ex-gay" therapies and he clearly believes that people can be "indoctrinated" into homosexuality. Describing homosexuality as something you can "practice" until you get it right sure goes a long way toward helping Holsinger's cause."