Enter the New Echo Chamber

First the New York Times created TimesSelect, which is a pay-to-read program for a number of the Times' highest profile writers. I wouldn't call all of them journalists since they infrequently venture into news reporting. I wouldn't call all of them members of the fact-based community because a few rarely report facts (hiya MoDo), and indeed repeatedly exaggerate or distort the facts to the point of being called out on the carpet by the Public Editor (hey Krugman, that means you).

Then, the Times decides that the only people who can email these folks are the same people who signed up for TimesSelect in the first place. Considering that so few people have signed up for TimesSelect (only about 330,000 people - and about half of those are print subscribers who got complimentary web access), it's likely to create an echo chamber for feedback. Who would want to pay to email any of the folks behind the new Iron Curtain? And the policy is annoying editors across the country who run the op-eds in syndication:

Back in September the Times asked the hundreds of papers who publish the Op-Ed contributors through The New York Times News Service (NYTNS) to stop printing the writers' e-mail addresses with the columns (and to take the columns off their Web sites, too). Apparently not everyone got the message, because last week the Times' syndication service sent out an advisory reminding its client papers to remove the e-mail addresses.

"If you are not a TimesSelect subscriber you won't have access to that e-mail functionality," Times spokesman Toby Usnik confirmed Tuesday. "It centralizes [the columnists' e-mails] around the TimesSelect site."

But instead of being able to put an address in a mail program and fire it off at your leisure, TimesSelect subscribers now have to fill out an online form similar to the generic feedback forms found on many Web sites.

"I think it is a bad idea," said Keith Runyon, opinion editor at The Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal, which runs all of the Times Op-Ed columnists. "Our goal is to give readers as much information as we can." Steve Smith, editorial page editor at The Republican in Springfield, Mass., which also runs the Times' columnists, agrees. "I would prefer that readers be allowed to e-mail columnists directly," he said. "We don't make readers pay to comment on editorials."

Freedom of the Press may give the paper the right to publish, but you've got to pay to give feedback.