Get Maureen Dowd for $3.42

Timothy Noah in Slate:

DowdPaul Krugman wins. John Tierney loses.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The New York Times will soon start charging to read its op-ed columnists online. The Times is offering its columnists as an all-or-nothing deal, but I proposed that each columnist be priced according to his or her value. I invited readers to allocate a $25 fee among the eight op-ed regulars. (The fee is actually going to be $49.95, but I made the rough estimate that access to the Times archive, which is also to be included in the package, will represent half the value.) An even allocation, I noted, would be a subscription price of $3.13 to read any given columnist online for one year. But not all Times op-ed columnists are equally worth reading. Hence my reader poll…

More here.