Hey New York Times ... Select this

I sleepily powered up my computer one morning a few months back, downloaded my email and then logged on to NYTimes.com to see what I had missed over the last eight hours. Heading from the news to the morning op-eds, I got hit by a huge rejection: TimesSelect. Apparently, the Times now feels that particular content (opinion content, to be specific) is now too valuable to give away for free.

What, exactly, was I to do? I could track down a paper copy at Firestone or in the clubs or colleges (in whatever shape they're in by the time I get there) or go online to LexisNexis to get it that way. Or I could pay the $50 and get all the content that I wanted and more. But as I was pondering how best to feed my addiction to news and commentary, I asked myself a very simple question: do I really need the Times columnists? Could I handle near-total withdrawal?

Several months in, the answer is a resounding yes. With the exception of Sunday mornings — what New Yorker doesn't need a Times to complete brunch? — I have managed to live without the New York Times columnists. To be honest, it really isn't that hard. I know what Dowd, Krugman and Herbert will say before I even get to their titles — column #535 on why President Bush is ruining this country — and they had become so radical that I stopped reading them before TimesSelect kicked in. Although more interesting, Tom Friedman is equally predictable (globalization anyone?). That leaves Kirstof, Tierney, and Brooks, whose nefarious Organization Kid article still makes my blood boil. In short, while they were nice to have around as leisurely morning reading, you don't need them to be informed citizens.

Unfortunately for the Times, my ambivalence about its columnists has spread to its one-off pieces and even to its editorials. Although they're still free on the website, for the time being, I can't seem to get myself interested in them. The combination of their basically predictable politics and often uninteresting subject matter (and I'm a politics major) means that on most mornings when I'm pressed for time, I just don't bother. It's not just me, either. I talk to people all across campus who are learning to live without the Times Op-Ed page.

I am definitely not saying that I have a right to New York Times content. This decision was, I'm sure, all about dollars and cents and as exclusive owners of their newspaper, The New York Times Co. absolutely has the right to make that decision. I'm not even surprised — I predicted a while back that the internet would lead to the proliferation of news to the point where conventional sources would either have to pull their material or find other ways of paying the bills.

But there is an unexpected externality of the TimesSelect concept: Comparatively poor college students across America are learning that the Times opinion page isn't nearly what it is cracked up to be and that we can live without it. While we're not the target audience of today, we're certainly the target audience of tomorrow. The problem for the times is that by the time we get on their radar, we may not want their paper anymore. That doesn't add up to good business strategy.

There is a better way out there. Foreign Affairs, one of the preeminent journals of foreign relations realized that universities are hubs of important (and often impoverished) readers. Not only do they offer heavily discounted subscriptions for students for the paper copy ($18/year, one of the best bargains around), but they offer the online, full content version free of charge to all students. How do they handle it? They simply created a list of 50 or so top-tier schools (we're on it), and if you access their site from within the network of one of those schools, you get content free. In short, they make it easy to make Foreign Affairs a habit that you will choose to continue after graduation.

In an era when more and more noise is available to educated consumers every day, the Times should be bending over backwards to get some version of its paper into our hands. After all, habits built now will last us our entire lives (weekend omelettes anyone?). Instead, Times staffers don't think that getting students to read the paper is a priority. That's their prerogative, but they should remember that the designation "newspaper of record" is inherently subjective and must be reconferred once each generation. What's happened in the world since I started this column? I don't know, let me check CNN. Matthew Gold is a politics major from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at mggold@princeton.edu.