Everyone's A Meta-Critic

On Friday, Timothy Noah published the results of his online survey which asked the question, “If you had to pay to read each New York Times columnist, how much would you pay?” Apropos of the Times announcing that they were going to place their columnists in a premium subscription-only area of the Times website, Noah was asking readers to rank the Times columnists according to relative value. Krugman won, Friedman came in a close second, Dowd finished middle of the pack, Brooks and Tierney finished dead last.

Several interesting things to say about this. First, Noah dismisses the polarized partisan results as a liberal bias among Slate’s readers, but we’d bet dollars to donuts that Slate’s demographic profile is virtually the same as the Times (especially the Times online). Now that the Washington Post owns Slate, in fact, it will be interesting to see whether the Times continues to be allowed to poach Slate staffers, no matter what Jack Shafer may say about it.

Second, Noah admits that he was floored by the response he got to his little poll. (Again, what did he expect? That no one who reads the Times reads Slate?) Idiotically, he conducted the poll by email, and was therefore unprepared for the one thousand ballots he received in the four hours of voting. He threw in the towel, and decided to hand count only the last half-hour of votes.

Finally, we see a clear and crucial difference in the way the Post will run Slate, versus how Microsoft would have done it. It’s the programming, dummy!

It will be interesting to watch the gauges at NYTimes.com after the premium subscription goes into effect. Doubtless the columnists will suddenly disappear forever from the “most emailed” or “most read” queues or whatever it is that tells you who is winning the daily popularity contest at the Times. But maybe not. Anyone who has ever tried to hide premium content from the masses has not succeeded, at least not 100 percent. We continue to think of it as a reward for those with the time, energy, and perseverance to find it free at any cost.

FOLLOWUPS: As we predicted here, this has come to pass. How do you think she did? We are conducting an anonymous email poll as to who our readers like better as a Strib ombud, Lou Gelfand or Kate Parry, each with a letter grade, please. Although we are not a Microsoft property, we are confident in our ability to do simple math, and we will report the results tomorrow.


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