This is so true

Jeff Jarvis on the death of TimesSelect.

I realized this morning — as the Times heavily promoted the death of TimesSelect as a new feature (’Free columnists!’ . . . or is that ‘Columnists freed!’?) — that I could link to and quote their opinion purveyors again. But I’m unlikely to, because TimesSelect broke the habit of reading the Times op-ed page. I lived quite well without it, thank you. Maureen Dowd had long since become a self-parody. I came to think that’d I’d already read every column Tom Friedman could write, a few times over. And when I stopped reading them — because, what was the point, I couldn’t link to them — I quickly found that I didn’t miss them. Newspapers are, in great measure, habit and once broken, it’s hard to reestablish that behavior. So bye-bye, guys.

A couple of years ago, every time a MoDo column was published, the blogosphere would erupt. Everyone was eager to skewer her. Now ... who cares?