clipped from: www.slate.com The New York Times' retreat from a subscription model is widely portrayed by online commentators as a humiliating and belated acceptance of the inevitable. But Matthew Gentzkow, an economist at the University of Chicago, recently published research that suggests that there has been no expensive mistake. Both the subscription model then and the advertising model now were likely to have been reasonable choices. Free online access makes more sense now not because of some fundamental law of online economics, but because the online advertising market has matured.