Drinking lots of coffee and reading the New York Times is one of my favorite Sunday morning rituals. (I live in a part of the country where that’s the only day you can get the Times delivered.) But lately it’s a pleasure partially spoiled by the full-page ad that appears every week in the op-ed section. Dressed fashionably in black, with a bright orange Gothic T logo, it seems to be a hip new incarnation of the famous “sweaty-guy” from the Questia ads.
College students, meet your new research assistant.
Looking for help with that research paper? Find it at TimesSelect, the premium service at nytimes.com. With Times Select, you’ll get access to 25 years of articles from the Times – articles on politics, history, science, art, business, sports, and just about any other subject you’re assigned. And TimesSelect also offers e-mail alerts whenever a new article on your topic appears.
How many ways can the New York Times sell itself to the same student? At my library we get the paper, the microfilm, the LexisNexis version, the Proquest version AND the Student Senate sponsors a newspaper program for a once-a-year student fee … and still students will say, glumly, at the reference desk “I found a great story in the New York Times but they wanted money for it, so . . . can you help me find something else?”
We’ve been activists about making scholarship freely available on the Web, but we aren’t doing a very good job of making sure people know they have free access to the same resources that they are being enticed to pay for through the Internet. Just don’t wait for the New York Times or any other publisher to point it out. As Lawrence Lessig joked last November at the NYPL’s “Battle of the Books” event, when someone pointed out that people who discover books via the Google library project might avoid buying them by going to the library, “This is den of piracy, right here – the library.” Why stop at selling the library an exhorbitantly expensive institutional subscription when you can keep selling the same content to the same market multiple times?
The only good news about this pitch is that most students are too savvy to imagine they could use one newspaper as their only source for papers in history, science, or politics.
And we can rest assured the Sweaty Guy finished his paper, graduated, and got a good job with the Newspaper of Record.
