The New York Times has changed its policy for online access to news articles older than thirty days. These articles are no longer available via the free registration process.

Do a Memestreams search for "nytimes" and browse down a few pages into the results for an NYT article from 2002. Try to follow the link. No dice.

What do they hope to gain by this? It seems likely to encourage private full-text archival of NYT articles, rather than on-demand online retrieval. Some may be dissuaded from linking to NYT at all, given the short fuse, and migrate to other publications that don't have a similar policy.

NYT Archive Disappears from the Net