NYT goes free, as in beer

THE NEW YORK TIMES is going free. Well, that's free as in beer, not free as in peoples. The online portal of the paper is going to stop charging a premium subscription fee to access its content online, instead allowing users to surf around with wild abandon, free from the constraints of walls.

Of course, everything that's free has a price - and this one is advertising.

TimesSelect, which provided access to a back catalogue of opinion writing and archives, used to cost $49.95 a year - and those subscribers generated about $10 million a year in revenue. But the bigwigs at The Times think they can make more by selling off the advertising around the pages.

The move is the latest in the ongoing war with the Wall Street Journal, America's other venerable online paper, which is widely expected to drop its subscription model under its new, Murdoch-led ownership.

So now, you can find out everything you could want to know about Intel. Isn't that comforting? µ