The New York Times announced Monday that it is ending its paid subscription service Times Select.

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.

"We now believe by opening up all our content and unleashing what will be millions and millions of new documents, combined with phenomenal growth, that that will create a revenue stream that will more than exceed the subscription revenue," Schiller said.

Well, all I can say is, "Duh!" The New York Times, despite unsavory episodes such as the whole Judith Miller affair, remains the newspaper of record. Additionally it publishes hundreds of lines of insightful, fascinating commentary and features every day. When the Times decided to wall off a large part of its' most interesting content that readers had to pay to access it could only mean fewer readers thus fewer ad revenues. I would imagine the reduced number of visitors from blogs linking directly to New York Times articles alone would have negatively impacted their ad revenues. On the other hand, generating revenue from original content is not easy in the digital age and is especially tough for newspapers so I can't fault the Times for trying out a subscription based model. It's just good to have all of the New York Times content available again.

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