TimesSelect: Not aimed at the readers, but aimed at the writers

you can see that, they did this simultaneously with a site-redesign. The result of this redesign is that all the OpEd columnists appear on the far right, below the scrolll -- you have to move down the page, rather than having them appear at the top.

Anyone doing site design *knows* that's horrible real estate. People look center, left, right, scroll down and repeat. The new position for columnists insures that they get far less attention that the now top of the page center Editorials -- which nobody is interested.

So what's going on? It seems to me that the NYTimes figured out that their columnists had become celebrities -- no holes barred -- in the blogosphere, only because they are columnists at the NYTimes, and the NYTimes was getting no ownership of that action.

What to do? You demote them all, move them aside to a lower place of feature and you make it harder for readers to read them, because you can't renegotiate their contracts once they exist. And now you've got a new ceiling, something to bargain with. If your columnists become famous and want more cash, you can offer them better placement. Or, make their columns free of charge. Which will increase their celebrity, and presumably their book marketability and lectureship fees.

In other words -- TimesSelect wasn't invented to get money from readers; TimesSelect was invented to claw back money from their writers.