Post-paywall NYT to remain blogger-friendly

In an interview yesterday with AllThingsDigital's Peter Kafka, New York Times spokeswoman Stacy Green attempted to allay concerns over the impact the NYT's forthcoming paywall on bloggers.  A new study on news and social media from the Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that 80% of blog entries link to one of just four news sources: the BBC, CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times.  Thus if the NYT's proposed paywall shuts out bloggers, the newspaper stands to lose an enormous portion of its Web traffic.

In downplaying fears over a fundamental shift to a 'closed web', the NYT spokeswoman reiterated an explanation of the 'metered model' underlying the NYT paywall.  In essence, users will be able to read a number of articles free of charge, and only after exceeding their quota will they be prompted to pay for content.  Furthermore, surfers who arrive at a given article from a blog link will not have that session counted against them.

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