Author: Eric Garris

The New York Times has announced that, effective midnight tonight, they will stop charging for access to various portions of their Website.

Two years ago the Times made what turned out to be a stupid decision: they decided to start charging for their top columnists, 20-year archives, and various special features. The result was that influential columnists like Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, and Maureen Dowd were marginalized, with far fewer people reading their articles.

The Times owners did not get the Web. They didn’t understand the effect of search engines and broad distribution on advertising and other “passive” revenue sources.

The Times article explains that they didn’t misunderstand, but it was the Web that changed:

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others.”

The Los Angeles Times tried a similar model in 2005, charging for access to its arts section, but quickly dropped it after experiencing a sharp decline in Web traffic. We can expect to see newspapers using this example to continue to move into the world of free information.

According to the respected GlobalSecurity.org, there were only 21 nations with ground troops in Iraq as of February of this year. No countries have joined the list since then, and a couple of nations have all but withdrawn their contingents.

In Bush’s speech tonight, he claimed that GIs are supported by troops from 36 nations.

In fact, only two other coalition nations have more than 1,000 troops in Iraq — Britain and South Korea. Seven nations have less than 100 troops in Iraq. Virtually all of these smaller contingents are confined to non-combat operations.

I guess no one had time to fact-check the speech.

Over the next six weeks, John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government will be touring to promote their blockbuster book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.

Mearsheimer and Walt are currently scheduled for 17 appearances between September 16 and October 29, including an appearance on The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. Cities they will be speaking in include Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, Chicago, Cambridge, Cleveland, New York, Iowa City, Dallas, and Washington.

Ron Paul gave the September 11 foreign policy address at the Johns Hopkins’ Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. His talk was “A Traditional Non-Intervention Foreign Policy.” CPFR director Robert Guttman and Andrew Ward, the Financial Times White House correspondent, moderated the Q&A session following Paul’s remarks.

Listen to the talk here.

Download MP3 here.

Three weeks ago seven US soldiers in Iraq wrote an op-ed in the New York Times expressing grave doubts about the war.

On Monday, Sgt. Omar Mora and Sgt. Yance T. Gray died in a vehicle accident in western Baghdad, two of seven U.S. troops killed in the incident which was reported just as Gen. David Petraeus was about to report to Congress on progress in the “surge.”

One of the other five authors of the Times piece, Staff Sergeant Jeremy Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head while the article was being written. He was expected to survive after being flown to a military hospital in the US.

Thanks to Greg Mitchell at Editor and Publisher for alerting us to this.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced early Wednesday he had vetoed legislation that would have allowed Californians to vote on an advisory measure calling for President Bush to immediately withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq.

The measure had been passed by the State Senate and State Assembly, and would have allowed Calfornians the chance to vote the February on a non-binding resolution calling for immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. This would have more clearly tied the Presidential primary to the issue of Iraq.

Schwarzenegger, a typical politician who clearly believes that Californians should not be allowed to express their decisions at the ballot box, said that the measure “would only further divide voters and shift attention from other critical issues that must be addressed.”