It’s starting to look like the Nwe York Times hit on a genius solution to boost sagging circulation – raise the price and piss people off. Appearantly operating on the “Forbidden Fruit” theory of economic motivation, by removing Dowd, Krugman and Kristoff from free circulation, they have made them hipper, infused them with the allure of the larcenous. A look at the Technorati top ten searches today include “Maureen Dowd”, “A Wolfie…”, Paul Krugman, John Tierney and Bob Herbert. The best watermellon in the world is stolen watermellon.
At least that’s the theory. Reading these jokers on the sly the past few days we have not noticed a significant upgrade in content. Perhaps the Times should have waited until they had a bunch of particularly brilliant columns in the can, before putting up the toll booth, just to convince people it was worth it.
Of course, columnists are supposed to be topical so canned stuff probably wouldn’t have worked. You can’t expect them to produce the good stuff on demand like trained animals. But they could have done somethng with performance-enhancing drugs. Just a thought.
Here is a link to today’s forbidden fruit, A Wolfie in Sheeps Clothingby Mme Dowd