This whole business of charging readers for access to the New York Times website got us thinking about a slight ethical dilemma we ignore every Sunday afternoon while liberating a fat, neglected copy of the Times from some out-of-towner's stoop. How early is too early to steal someone's Sunday Times? For guidance, we asked a couple NY Times reporters. (They don't get free subscriptions!) One veteran staff reporter, who agreed to speak anonymously, is surprisingly brazen:
I'd say noon. If you're not up and out in the morning, I think you lose your right to it. You snooze you lose. But there are other factors that are way more important than the time. Like how tough the neighbor [you are taking it from] is.
Can they kick your ass? Are there any surveillance cameras around? Will the neighbors see? That's way more important than whether or not you are ethically right."
"I don't even buy the Sunday paper. It's $5, it's 5 pounds," our source added. Yeah, and 4.9 pounds of ads, (chortle)! We do feel like chumps whenever we pay for it, because an hour later it becomes clear that we handed over five bucks to read Frank Rich, and then get driven into a misanthropic rage by the Style section. Of course, what's annoying about stealing the Sunday edition is that you don't get all of it, because some sections, like Arts & Leisure, come Saturday, requiring too much calculating criminality.
But another Times reporter would have us resist taking the paper until next week! "As a former Sunday subscriber, I would ask that a paper liberator wait until 10 a.m. monday to liberate a paper," says the reporter. "Sometimes we would go out of town for the weekend and would not return home till late Sunday and not go to bring the paper in till Monday morning. It was a quality-of-life downer to not find it waiting for us." Great, now we feel bad. Just not bad enough to shell out five dollars this Sunday.
