This is not gadget related but still good news. The New York Times is dropping its subscription model. The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night, reflecting a growing view in the industry that subscription fees cannot outweigh the potential ad revenue from increased traffic on a free site.
While meeting its targets, the Times found that advertising sales growth projections outweighed those its subscriber base growth. This is due to the large volume of traffic that is referred to articles by search engines or other sites. Opening up pay-only content will allow the Times to serve up more pages and therefore more ads.
Not only will the entire site now be available for free, but so will the archives dating back to 1987 and those from 1851 to 1922 which are in the public domain.