The New York Times Flirts with Openness and Can't Make Up Its Mind

One of the big stories of last week was the announcement from the NY Times that they would be implementing a so-called 'paywall' around their content, requiring readers to pay to view more than a certain number of articles. This has caused quite a dust-up in the online journalistic community, and has been viewed as a blow to openness on the web.

This is undoubtedly an important tech story, but alone it doesn't have much to do with poetry. A few days ago we intended to publish an article on this blog pointing out the vast amount of metadata the Gray Lady released beginning last year on data.nytimes.com. This is basically an online version of the fantastic New York Times Index, which is essentially a list of all the topics used in the newspaper going back decades. It's an important document for vocabulary in American English, and certainly having this information available as linked open data, along the lines of Project Gutenberg, is something of interest to anyone who deals in words. 

It was a big step for the Times to make this information so easily available to the world, and under a Creative Commons license at that. This data can be shared and used in any number of applications and resources. And on top of that, the NY Times Online has a great 'Open Blog' that covers in great detail and good spirit the goings on in the online open source community.

We intended to publish a post on all these things, and to point to the Times as a forward-thinking exemplar of what open journalism can look like. Before that post could even hit the blog, the announcement came that they had made the decision to charge for content. Now, this may prove be to a very shrewd business move. In another year we may be talking about the success of the Times model of paying for news. But what message is the New York Times trying to send by releasing vast amounts of metadata under a CC license while announcing they'll charge for viewing articles? Is the Linked Open Data project lip service to an ideal the Times doesn't really care about? Or is the distinction between topics and the articles themselves clear enough that this isn't a contradiction?

This is a hot-button issue, and there are certainly many ways to look at it. We'd love to hear what you think. Feel free to comment below or send me a quick message on Twitter.