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Paywalls and Readers

January 17, 2010 23:45:40.318

I see the Times is leaning in a paywall direction again:

After a year of sometimes fraught debate inside the paper, the choice for some time has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system.

While I understand the need to make money, I'm just not sure this is going to work for them. The problem for the Times is that they desperately want to preserve their existing business model in an environment that will support a lot fewer employees nad overhead. Then there's the loss of influence problem - I ran across this commeneary from Ann Althouse:

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.

Now, I'm a very small player, so the loss of links from me won't mean much, but I feel the same way. During the baseball season, I've often linked to stories about the Yankees (and the pennant races in general) in the Times. With this change? I can't link to stories that are going to be invisible to most people either,

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posted by James Robertson

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