As of this evening you can’t get access to the Op-Ed columnists of the New York Times unless you pony up for “Times Select”:http://www.nytimes.com/products/timesselect/whatis.html, a new subscription service. I have no plans to sign up. Don’t know about you. I doubt this spells the beginning of the end either for political bloggers or the relevance of the Op-Ed page to the chattering classes at large. But it does seem that this will reduce the columnists’ ability to set the agenda for online chatterers like ourselves. We won’t have David Brooks or Airmiles Friedman to kick around any more. But is that bad for us, or for them? NYT columnists are the pinatas of the _conscience collective_. If not so many people are reading them, you have to wonder whether it’s worth signing up yourself just for the content. I think we benefit at CT. The _Times_ makes you pay to read Paul Krugman, but his substitutability with our own “John Quiggin”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/author/john-quiggin/ is pretty high, and as of this evening we’re therefore e a better deal than ever.
This Friday and Saturday I had the pleasure of spending some face-to-face time with a group of bloggers several of whom will be familiar to the CT crowd (click on the photo for details). Dan Drezner and our very own Henry Farrell organized a great meeting on The Power and Political Science of Blogs. Ethan Zuckerman kindly took copious notes and has posted some of them on his blog.
Congrats to Dan and Henry for hosting a very interesting and productive meeting. The conference featured some of the best discussions I’ve heard and participated in on the subject of blogging. I think we are all invigorated and inspired now to go and finish writing up our related papers.:)