dangurewitch:

“[Taylor Swift sang] “You Belong With Me” with Stevie Nicks, whose dress was black as a black cat.”

-The New York Times, really taking their writing to the next level

I don’t like paywalls. I firmly believe that if you put in ads in your content you are able to make money and keep your content free to users. It works for TV, so it should work online, more or less. So it’s quite ridiculous to see these once-free sites such as the Wall Street Journal erect a wall to stop people from reading their articles unless they pay. A lot.

This makes no sense. Say I did have a subscription to the WSJ online. I read an interesting exclusive article and I want to share it. How, exactly? I can’t copy the link, it will either become expired or it will badger the reader with a trial or show only half of the article (like how the South China Morning Post does), so I don’t bother talking about that paper with my friends. Right there, they’ve lost a potential reader. Same goes for magazines and other newspapers that go this route.

And so will the New York Times. One of my favorite newspapers that has always been free, will no longer in 2011. You could check out archives dating back to as far as they would let you, read any article, have unobtrusive ads, and excellent stories for free. People would still buy the paper, and they make money off those online versions of the paper (see Times Reader) that are more intuitive than the normal free version, but offers more or less the same thing.

Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site.

So it’s like a glorified trial. It’s not the first time the NYT has been dabbling with this, but it seems to tell me that online advertising isn’t working. And that can’t be it. They have the most readers online, and advertisers pay more for higher traffic. So why are they doing this? What I do know is that this won’t be good, and I hope they come round before 2011.

I will erect a paywall in early 2011 as well. $49.95 a year to read all my articles!

Or Taleban, if you’re British. Sheesh guys, spell it OUR way, dammit.

Anyway, a journalist and his other journalist buddy and his driver in Afghanistan were kidnapped. And being New York Times journalists, obviously they made him write a fancy exclusive series about his experience and put it in five parts over a few days and stuff. Pretty amazing stuff, from the capture to the escape, in very gritty detail, like they… made it up. Just kidding. Very narrative-like, which isn’t a bad thing.

I suggest you read it before the writer turns it into a book and charges thirty bucks for ir.

There’s an interesting column in the New York Times about multitasking, and how maybe having a movie or music playing or instant messaging in the background while you work may not be a bad thing.

…So I decided to test my digital immigrant biases — which tell me that no one can study effectively while watching, listening, surfing, messaging — against my professional experience, which tells me that medical students who don’t study effectively can’t learn the huge and complex body of material they have to master, and will therefore not pass their frequent tests. In other words, I asked my son and his friends, people in their early to middle 20s who do an awful lot of studying.

These medical students did sound like expert studiers, in that they had paid close attention to the different kinds of concentration required for different tasks.

“If I’m studying to memorize,” my son told me, “I’m still usually chatting” — instant messaging, that is. “But it’s usually not real-time chatting. I’ll look up every once in a while and I’ll chat; I may have a movie going on in the background, but I’ll go for a movie I’ve already seen.”

Everyone must agree with that.

The New York Times has traced back the First Lady’s family tree back to a slave called Melvinia.

In 1870, three of Melvinia’s four children, including Dolphus, were listed on the census as mulatto. One was born four years after emancipation, suggesting that the liaison that produced those children endured after slavery. She gave her children the Shields name, which may have hinted at their paternity or simply been the custom of former slaves taking their master’s surnames.

Even after she was freed, Melvinia stayed put, working as a farm laborer on land adjacent to that of Charles Shields, one of Henry’s sons.