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. Green clarifies this in the following statement:

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, 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...articles that readers access via links from third party sites to NYTimes.com will count toward the reading limit but never trigger the gate.

PressGazette reported today that a new UK study found that 90% of people would be unwilling to pay for access to news websites, a figure that supports what Sunday Times editor John Withrow said in anticipation of the paper's forthcoming paywall: that perhaps more than 90% of readers were likely to be lost once the paywall went up next month. The idea is, presumably, that these readers who remain will be more valuable.

In September 2005, The New York Times first attempted to erect a paywall, which it called TimesSelect. The scheme was widely regarded as a failure and it was discontinued two years later. At the time, NYT columnist Thomas Friedman spoke out against TimesSelect, saying "I hate it. It pains me enormously because it's cut me off from a lot, a lot of people." In order to circumvent the TimesSelect paywall, bloggers would illegally republish NYT stories, and at least one website was dedicated to indexing these illegal copies.

We will have to wait until January 1st, 2011 to see how the NYT's paywall project pans out and if the paper's strategy with regards to bloggers is successful.

Sources: All Things Digital, Pew Research Center