Another Brick In The Wall

First The New York Times took its all-star stable of opinion columnists, put them in the TimesSelect pen, and started charging admission to read them. Now it turns out, according to Editor & Publisher's Joe Strupp, you even have to pay to e-mail them:

"Back in September the Times asked the hundreds of papers who publish the Op-Ed contributors through The New York Times News Service (NYTNS) to stop printing the writers' e-mail addresses with the columns (and to take the columns off their Web sites, too). Apparently not everyone got the message, because last week the Times' syndication service sent out an advisory reminding its client papers to remove the e-mail addresses.

'If you are not a TimesSelect subscriber you won't have access to that e-mail functionality,' Times spokesman Toby Usnik confirmed Tuesday. 'It centralizes [the columnists' e-mails] around the TimesSelect site.'

But instead of being able to put an address in a mail program and firing it off at your leisure, TimesSelect subscribers now have to fill out an online form similar to the generic feedback forms found on many Web sites."

"Usnik denied that the limit on e-mails was an effort to get readers at newspapers syndicating the columnists to pay for TimesSelect instead of their local paper. 'That is not the intent,' Usnik said. But when asked what those newspaper readers should do to be able to contact the columnists, he urged them to sign up and pay the additional fee. 'The recommendation would be that they consider subscribing to TimesSelect.'"