With all the talk of future paywalls to view online articles from newspapers, bloggers are worried that many of the free links they provide to readers may be doomed to extinction.
Peter Kafka of All Things Digital, part of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, writes:
Will the paywall the New York Times is building scare away the paper’s natural allies—bloggers who like to link to the site?
Wait a minute! Do bloggers function as “natural allies” of the mainstream media, or are we their harshest critics? Leaving that aside for the moment, bloggers will be heartened by this e-mail that NY Times spokeswoman Stacy Green sent to Kafka in response to his query:
Once the pay model is implemented next year, the majority of our readers will be unaffected when using the site and will continue to have the same experience they have always had. Readers will only be prompted to pay after reaching a certain reading limit.
The pay model will be designed so readers that are referred from third party sites such as blogs will be able to access that content without hitting their limit [emphasis added], enabling NYTimes.com to continue being a part of the open[?!?] web. We have not yet set the reading limit and we will communicate that once we have made the decision.
What’s not clear from this is whether the bloggers themselves will hit the paywall after accessing a (still unannounced) number of articles per month, with the intention of passing the links on to readers. CultureGrrl, as a subscriber to the dead-tree version of the Gray Lady, will, I believe, continue to have free online access. (Or maybe they’ll erect a special paywall just for me!)
In other good news: My new eye, installed yesterday, went on exhibition today. Thanks to the miracle of a Toric lens implant, my “bad eye” now sees 20-30 without (external) glasses, instead of 20-400! Upon leaving the office of my beloved ophthalmologist, I immediately celebrated by viewing the paintings at
Gagosian that Monet created when he had cataracts:
