"I could have loved the way news works on this thing, if the NY Times and been willing to ship a beautiful reverse-chronologic view of their whole news stream. They chickened out with a little mini-dip-into the stream. It's like sipping the news from an espresso cup when I want to be inundated by Niagara Falls."

It seems clear that big media sees this as the last chance to provide news "samples" in the hopes of rolling back the clock to 1995 and getting us to pay for the whole thing. Somehow the lesson of the web has been lost to them.

Having worked at a newspaper I know the rule back in the early nineties was - consumers pay for the cost of distribution, advertisers pay for everything else. They need to accept that the cost of distribution is heading to zero, and that's what consumers will pay.