NYT's TimesMachine cool, but you gotta pay

The New York Times website launched the TimesMachine feature today, a nifty tool that lets you flip back through virtual reprints of its first 70 years of issues, from 1851 to 1922.  When you hover your mouse over an old article, the text of it pops up for easy reading.  "Bullet Tears Brain, Man Lives for Hours," blares a  headline from 1908.  (Therein is recounted the tale of a man who shot himself in the head and didn't immediately die. "I thought I'd be dead," read the man's money quote, which he gave shortly before dying.)

Sadly, the new feature isn't free -- you've got to be a print subscriber to have access.  The NYT seems to be continuing its inconsistent policy of making some features for-pay, and others free.  You would think that the Internet demographic most likely to make use of the TimesMachine feature would be the group least likely to subscribe to the print version -- and that the NYT may therefore be missing an opportunity to use the flashy tool to lure readers to its site.  If I'm wrong, though, and making the service exclusive to print subscribers somehow boosts circulation -- I'll be happy to eat my fedora. 

Comments

[Jack]

Parts of it seem to be free. I was able to read the original Titanic stories as well as pieces about the German invasion of France in 1940.