Friday, October 07, 2005

Update: New York TimesSelect

My free 14-day trial for TimesSelect (the new service from the New York Times) is coming to an end. I've decided not to get the 1-year subscription.

Most of the big stories on the site are for free and I frequent other sources on the web enough so that I find myself running out of time. The trade-off is spending your time reading one source in-depth rather than reading six or seven sources, the latter of which I think has more benefits than drawbacks.

That's not to say that I am reading multiple sources superficially. There's nothing I enjoy more than reading four or five stories from different sources on the same "story." Perhaps my undergraduate training in critical theory has ruined me, making getting the news a bore compared to the thrill of deconstructing the coverage (it's probably the reason I can't enjoy novels anymore, either).

What I am saying is that if you don't want to spend any money for news coverage (home delivery, online subscriptions, magazines), you don't have to. You can be more than reasonably well informed just for free.

The best thing TimesSelect had going for it was the ability to search archives of past articles. But it turns out that my law school subscription for LexisNexis (and a whole host of other databases at my library's website) offer the same access. So I am not paying for access I already have for free.

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