NYTimes.com Tom Friedman and other top NYT columnists will no longer be behind a paid subscription wall.

What may be more interesting than that: No one has yet made a big to-do about it here on Tidbits (or at a lot of other journalism sites). Sure it's been remarked upon, but there seems (to me) to be a collective yawn. Maybe that’s because the elimination of the paid wall was hinted at several weeks ago, or because it had only (?) 227,000 subscribers, or...

Essentially, the Times is betting it can generate enough advertising revenue and/or goodwill to more than make up the loss of $10 million in subscription revenue. That's a lot of ads, but the popular columns and archives that were behind the pay wall and now will be available without charge are pretty popular material and should generate a lot of pageviews.

For me, I subscribed to Times Select for a year, but found that I didn’t use it enough to make it worthwhile. So I dropped it, and only noticed once or twice. But it sure will be good to be able to read Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd again (when I get around to them).