Legal Commentary

We're going to have to pay to read the NYT on line.

For me, reading on line is tied to blogging. I'm not going to spend my time reading sites that I can't blog, and I'm not going to blog and link to sites that you can't read without paying. Currently, I link to the NYT a lot, perhaps several times a day. I don't know how much of their traffic is sent their way from blogs, but it's one more factor that will limit their readership. You'd think what a newspaper would want most is readers, both to influence and to sell to advertisers. I know they need to make money, but I wish advertising was the way. Once they close themselves off ? as they did once before with the failure known as TimesSelect ? they sacrifice readers and lose appeal for advertisers.

I know there is talk of "the metered system adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe." If that means we can, without paying, see the front page and read a few articles (in their entirety) each day, then I might not object. That would allow me to read and feel free to blog.

ADDED:

Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times? last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. Not long before the Times ultimately pulled the plug on TimesSelect, Friedman wrote Sulzberger a long memo explaining that, while he was initially supportive of TimesSelect, he?d been alarmed that he had lost most of his readers in India and China and the Middle East.

?As we got into it, it was clear to me I was getting cut off from a lot of my readers in India and China where 50 dollars per year would be equal to a quarter of college tuition,? Friedman recently told me by phone. ?What was coming to me anecdotally from my travels was the five worst words that as a columnist you ever want to hear: ?I used to read you before you went behind the wall.??

Full post as published by Althouse on January 17, 2010 (boomark / email).