As Hurricane Irene approaches the upper east coast, property damage is of course a key concern—but Hurricane Irene is also, at least temporarily, knocking down some virtual walls—paywalls. Laura Hazard Owen reports on PaidContent that the New York Times and Newsday.com are both making hurricane coverage available to all readers for free. E-magazine service Zinio is also offering free issues of several electronic magazines to travelers stranded by the hurricane. Of course, the usefulness of these free services depends on people being able to keep their connectivity during the storm. USA Today has a guide suggesting ways for...

Ever since Rupert Murdoch's The Times erected a paywall a year ago, observers have been curious about whether it could bring in enough paying readers with such a strict no-free-content policy. This week, AdNews reported that the newspaper "now has 101,036 people signed up to its digital platforms including website, iPad and kindle wireless reading device"—a 28% increase from February's tally of 79,000. This time last year, there were reports that nobody was going past the registration page (not even print subscribers with free access), with one person guesstimating that less than 30,000 readers had subscribed to the website or the...

I haven’t been paying a whole lot of attention to the New York Times’s controversial paywall since its announcement a couple of weeks ago. It seems like a fairly complicated proposition, with a number of interesting nuances—different levels of charge for subscriptions on different devices and the like. Those who read via the web (and aren’t already paid NY Times subscribers) get 20 article views per month for free—certainly more articles than I’ve ever read in a month. And as if that weren’t enough, redirects from search, blogs, and social media don’t count against the total. (This led...

Rupert Murdoch’s paywalled Times papers have seen traffic drop considerably, leading advertisers to rethink their expenditures. But a report mentioned on Read Write Web suggests that paywalls, when implemented properly, may not be the kiss of death to ad revenue after all. Out of two dozen small- and medium-sized newspapers served by Journalism Online, those that chose to implement a progressive paywall scheme where visitors get to view a certain amount of content without paying (as I noted earlier today that the New York Times will be using) found unique visits and page views fell by only slight amounts,...

Robert Andrews at PaidContent has a brief piece on News Corp’s UK papers The Times and The Sun getting excited about using the iPad to “break with a century-old British tradition of not publishing an edition on Christmas Day,” in the hope of catching the attention of Christmas recipients of new iPads. But these iPad editions were, Andrews points out, little more than self-promotion vehicles, containing largely Christmas stuff and editorials about how awesome the iPad and paywalls are. What little news content they did contain was often outdated by the newspaper websites, which were updated throughout the day...

James Murdoch, son of Rupert Murdoch and Chairman and Chief Executive of News Corporation, Europe and Asia, recently spoke at the Stationers Guild as part of its year-long commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the Statue of Anne, the first real copyright law. The full text of the speech has been posted to copyright-debate.co.uk. The purpose of the speech was to draw parallels between the 18th century and the 21st century copyright landscape. Murdoch compared the “low-cost copying and distribution” (relative to what had come before) afforded by the printing press in 1710 and the same relative cheapness of...

Clay Shirky has posted an interesting editorial looking at the paywalls of Rupert Murdoch’s Times and Sunday Times in relation to paywalls in general. He notes that there is nothing that really makes Murdoch’s paywalls any different from other paywalls of the past and present, but there is a difference in the way people are looking at them. What is new about the Times’ paywall–what may in fact make it a watershed–isn’t strategy or implementation. What’s new is that it has launched as people in the news business are re-thinking assumed continuity [the assumption that readers...

It’s no secret I’m not terribly keen on paywalls for Internet newspaper content. I think they don’t work, and they break the hyperlinking that is fundamental to the Internet. So I’m watching the London Times’s paywall experiment with interest. This story from the Independent provides an update of what is known about the project’s success so far. Though it does provide both anti-paywall and pro-paywall points of view, the anti-paywall one seems a lot more convincing—the pro-paywall side seems to come off a bit like whistling in the dark to me. Reportedly, traffic to the Times...

Rupert Murdoch is once again boosting Apple’s iPad. The Guardian writes that Murdoch spoke at a media debate, saying of Apple: "It looks like they will sell around 15m iPads this calendar year and more than 40m by 2012. And the iPad is just one of many tablet or slate computers in the pipeline. News Corp fully intends to be across all those platforms too." He also had disparaging words for anyone who used the expression “Information wants to be free.” (I am so, so sick of both that expression and of people...

On the Press Gazette blog, Dominic Ponsford notes an interesting fact about the Financial Times’s paywall, which has come in for relatively less press attention than the London Times’s (perhaps due to lacking the polarizing figure of Rupert Murdoch to act as a focus). Although (or perhaps because) the Financial Times‘s paywall is considerably less rigid than the London Times’s (allowing visitors from Google, and letting unpaid subscribers read up to 10 articles per month), the Financial Times seems to be experiencing considerably more success, recently claiming to have 149,000 paying digital subscribers. Ponsford writes: ...

Remember Rupert Murdoch’s paywall on the London Times? On Newser, writer Michael Wolff reports that Murdoch is keeping mum about how much success it is (or is not) having, but Wolff claims that an anonymous source has told him that almost nobody is subscribing to the website, and subscribers to the printed paper (who are also granted access to the digital version) are not visiting the site. Wolff calls it “an empty world.” The wider implications of this emptiness are only just starting to become clear. A Murdoch and Fleet Street veteran with whom I’ve...

Since The Times’s website just went from registration-wall to full-fledged paywall, the articles about paywall journalism are coming out in force. Here is a trio of particularly interesting ones. On the “Strange Attractor” blog, Kevin Charman-Anderson goes into the economics of print versus web publication and advertising. He notes that printed papers cost a lot more than web publishing (pointing out the statistic that for the amount the New York Times spends on printing, it could send every subscriber two Kindles), but print advertising makes up 80% of most papers’ revenue. Charman-Anderson points out that online advertising...