Free access to articles on the New York Times web site used to expire after 30 days. After that time you were required to pay $2.95 to read an article if you used NYT’s search to find it. But if you had the original URL to the month-old content, the one that appeared in their index pages when the article was current, you could still access it freely for an unlimited period of time. This allowed sites to link to NYT articles without forcing those users to pay for the specific article referred, while people who used the NYT’s own search for research would have to pay the fee.

I often wanted to take another look at articles I’d read in the printed edition after their free period expired and would be irritated by the $2.95 fee after already paying them $46/month for the daily subscription. But I didn’t want to keep stacks of old newspapers lying around in the chance that I might want to read something again, so I duped the NYT by creating a daily cron job that would capture each day’s HTML of each major section of the newspaper. I also stripped out the advertisements and other repetitive junk to get each day’s HTML grab down to ~1MB. The cron’d Perl script would then save the HTML according to date/month/year/section so I could do a search for an article on the NYT web site and then access the original link from my archives with a few clicks.

But today I noticed the NYT shut down free access for ALL URLs! By denying those with original links access to the articles it means that linking to NY Times will be worthless after seven days (unless the casual reader wants to pony up $2.95), so they can expect an enormous drop in incoming traffic. They’ve even reeled back the free period from 30 days to 7 days, without providing any special leeway for daily subscribers.

I’m bummed that my favorite major newspaper is shutting out folks like me who subscribe to the daily newspaper but prefer to preserve articles in a digital format. I assume they’re getting pressure to make the web site financially sustainable and, since the amount of growth the free online edition has provided for the paid printed version is not quantifyable and disregarded, this was the knee-jerk reaction to increase revenue before management had a reasonable, thought-out plan for subscribers.

I’m not planning on further subverting the NYT by grabbing every single page of each day’s news—that seems a bit extreme and would gobble up more HD space than would be worth. Instead I’ve written to feedback@nytimes.com and am hoping they’ll come up with a better solution, especially for paid subscribers.