I'm definitely joining the chorus of joy extolling the death of TimesSelect. We all know that information wants to be free, and it has to be free to be even remotely relevant online—especially in light of my growing fear that a substantial minority of adults in this city seem to believe the internet is equivalent to google.

But the appearance of "free" and "news" together in (many) single blog posts reminded me of this Wellington Grey cartoon I meant to comment on awhile back. You see, I'm all for free news in print as well as online—the more the merrier! But I loathe, from the very depths of my soul, the concept of those free papers being forced onto hurried people during rush hour.

It's not just that the poor saps thrusting free rags in my face add yet another obstruction to my already-blood-broiling commute on the 6—and occasionally cause me to twist my ankle falling down the stairs!—what really gets to me is that I simply can't deduce even a hint of a financially sound newspaper operating strategy from their ubiquitous presence at seemingly every subway entrance in Manhattan five mornings a week.

I mean, we know from the lawsuit filed by AM New York's hawkers in August, they're paid only $20 a day for up to four hours of work (note to self: be a little nicer to these underpaid folks). While this salary is obviously not enough to live on anywhere in the vicinity of New York—and, you know, illegal—it's a nontrivial expense for the papers themselves.

According to the MTA, there are 468 stations in the city. Even if the free dailies are only staffing, say, 100 of them (because, let's face it, they probably only care about wealthy Manhattan eyeballs), that's $2,000 a day spent forcing people to read your paper—half a million dollars a year (calculated as 5 days a week for 52 weeks minus 10 nationally recognized holidays).

Really, AM New York? Really Metro? You couldn't roll that half a mil into your content budget and maybe upgrade to a halfway-decent editorial staff who could put together a paper that someone might actually *want* to read instead of providing the kindling for track fires? Or—at the very least—spend it on real advertising to trick us into thinking we want to read your paper instead of thwarting our mad dash for the departing train?

After all, the real moral of Battelle's story about the shift in reading habits from pull to point is that we want to read what other people are talking about and blogging about. Not what people are shoving in our caffeine-starved faces first thing in the morning.