The Times' paywall - initial reaction
Jinfo Blog

12th July 2010

By Penny Crossland

Item

The Times’paywall has been up and running for 10 days now and the media pundits have been busy commenting on whether Murdoch’s gamble will pay off or not. (See http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29136 ,http://www.vivavip.com/go/e28452, http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27766 and http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27220 for details of subscription costs and further discussion of the topic). To re-cap: the price of admission to The Times and Sunday Times sites (http://www.timesplus.co.uk) is £1 for a day pass or £2 for a week’s access. As soon as users click on anything on the site, they are invited to register – there are no leading paragraphs or abstracts available to view. However, there is a current special introductory offer of 30 days’ access for £1, so it’s still too early to measure the effect the new venture has on visitor numbers. The paywall is called by some “the boldest move by a major media company this year” (see John Sandvand’s blog at http://digbig.com/5bcagd) and by others an “attempt to block news content from escaping”, thereby “informing customers only”, rather than generating wider discussion. (see Clay Shirky’s article at http://digbig.com/5bcage ) In fact Shirky, a new media teacher at New York University is convinced that not only does The Times paywall not make financial sense; the experiment will fail because the Murdoch newspapers will no longer be engaging with the public, since it will have locked out all but its loyal customers. The result could be that News International shoots itself in the foot: Online intelligence company Hitwise, predicts that “the global influence” of the two newspapers will decline “as they block entry by search engines and thereby cut themselves off from the link-economy of the web”. (http://digbig.com/5bcagf) The Guardian, meanwhile, a major competitor and a strong advocate for keeping online news free for all, has been trying to woo disaffected Times readers and writers into its fold. The Times law blogger, Tim Kevan is to join the Guardian after leaving the Times in protest at turning the paper into an “exclusive preserve of a limited few subscribers” (http://digbig.com/5bcagg). Roy Greenslade of The Guardian also claims to have spotted copy from a free blog on the Sunday Times site, which was posted without attribution. (http://digbig.com/5bcagh) Not a good move from a publisher who is attempting to adopt the moral high ground over copyright and journalistic integrity.

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