kewpid.net

The New York Times (NYT) has decided to finally remove its ridicu­lous pay-wall ser­vice (TimesSe­lect), mean­ing all con­tent is now freely avail­able to any­one with inter­net access. On top of that they are going to pro­gress­ively make avail­able the entire NYT archives stretch­ing back to 1851. As a uni­ver­sity stu­dent, appar­ently I’ve had free access behind the pay-wall for some time but I’ve never worked out how to do that.

In some ways the NYT

is ana­log­ous to the Sydney Morn­ing Her­ald (SMH). It ostens­ibly cov­ers the news rel­ev­ant to its eponym­ous city, but has over time expan­ded to become a national newspaper-of-record. But the NYT is dis­tinctly super­ior in both its breadth and depth of cov­er­age, and its web team is without peer.

The dens­ity of media own­er­ship in Aus­tralia is rap­idly erod­ing its qual­ity and inde­pend­ence, and the SMH with its over-the-top treat­ment of issues such as horse flu (eeek­wine infloooen­zah) is becom­ing very tabloid-ish. Thank­fully, for the glob­ally con­nec­ted at least, there is plenty of choice to con­sume the super­ior over­seas alternatives.

Shade psp