Times Select is dead!  Or it will be dead by the end of the week.  No longer will a breathless online nation be denied the pithy prose stylings of Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd unless they anted up 8 bucks a month.  There will be no more Sundays where Americans who lack the resources to pay for Times Select will vainly ponder the question, “I wonder what movie Frank Rich compared the Bush administration to this week.”  And yes, once again and at last, the breathtaking originality of Tom Friedman will be available for free to the unwashed masses who eschewed the siren song of Times Select.

You know what bothers me about the whole Times Select misadventure?  It’s not that I’ve had to go the last few years without reading Paul Krugman.  I’ve survived that ordeal surprisingly well.  And it’s not the institutional arrogance/stupidity that the Times displayed in actually thinking that people would shell out real money to read the entirely unoriginal content of its op-ed page.  And it’s not even that the Times’ business model had it completely bass-ackwards – there’s loads of opinion for free on the internet.  The Times’s potential value-add that people may actually have paid for was its hard news, not the wheezing gas-bags who populate its opinion pages.

What really bugs me is that this Edsel of an online adventure will convince a lot of people (people that matter like venture capitalist people) that you can’t make money in selling online content.  Many analysts will conclude, “If the New York Times couldn’t do it, it can’t be done.”  This couldn’t be more wrong.  Just because no one has created a profitable model for selling on-line content yet doesn’t mean it won’t happen eventually. And inevitably.

If there was an online magazine or newspaper that had James Lileks, Mark Steyn, Bill Kristol, Andrew Ferguson, John Podhoretz, Bill Simmons, Terry Teachout and Michael Yon contributing daily, I’d pay for it.  A lot of other people would, too.  The Times’ big failure wasn’t in thinking they could sell on-line opinion.  Their failure was in thinking they could sell crappy and unoriginal on-line opinion.

Someone will someday realize that you can build a much better mousetrap than the Times did.  And that person will make a lot of money.

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