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The New York Times is setting its "Times Select" content free, rather than placing it behind a paywall, says rival The New York Post. The service, which has around 220,000 subscribers paying $7.95/month.
The theory, at least among bloggers and technologists, is that the NYTimes would get more money and (more importantly) attention by freeing up its premium content and making it linkable, searchable and sharable on social news sites. This move should prove or disprove that theory, and I'm pretty optimistic that it'll prove to be a good move. A good move for the newspaper at least: in part, it was premium content barriers that helped opinionated bloggers get a foothold. The only barrier, says the Post, is changing the technology to make the content free.