OK, so we write a lot of posts that link to the New York Times. The articles produced by the fine journalists there are a source of inspiration, frustration and everything in between. Our reliance on the Grey Lady would qualify as a dirty secret of sorts, if it weren’t for the fact that we are totally ratted out by our handy Word Cloud on the right of this page. Look for yourself: the New York Times is our most used keyword, just ahead of The Tantrum and Bad Dad.
Naturally, then, we were interested in the news today that the New York Times is erecting a paywall of some sort, for frequent users, in 2011.
This presents a couple problems for us, of course. Primarily, we won’t know which of our readers are frequent enough nytimes.com readers that they would have to pay to see a story we’d click on. So we’ll be much less inclined to link to them. We’ll link to alternatives that we know you guys will be able to read for free. And yes, there are alternative versions, in other publications, of many of the stories the Times does.
That’s the problem with being the New York Times. The scope of the paper each day is impressive, but many of the individual articles are replaceable. Take my recent post, which launched off a New York Times article about more men marrying wealthier women. I linked to the Times piece because it was convenient, well-written, and–because it was a New York Times trend story–slightly fun to mock. But the study that the article was reporting on? That was from the Pew Center, based a little survey called the US Census. And I could have just as easily linked to an article on the same report from Australia’s The Age, the LA Times or even a (free) blog at the Wall Street Journal.
As Reuters’ Felix Salmon points out, there’s not much word on what will happen to the Times’ blogs. Hopefully they will remain somewhere outside of the wall. We have previously expressed our affection for the Motherlode blog there; we’d hate to have those and other conversations silenced.
There’s plenty of regular Times content you’re just not going to find anywhere else, and it’s damned good (the work of a certain DadWagoner who likes getting his traveler frugaled comes to mind). I have also written for the Times, and I wish them luck in making more money. Perhaps then they can pay more money. But if linking to them means frustrating our readers, then I, for one, will start linking to their many free competitors.