New York Times: Paywall Won’t Affect Social Sharing Either

Arthur Sulzberger, chairman of The New York Times Co., said yesterday at the Conversational Media Summit in Manhattan that the NYTimes.com paywall, scheduled to appear in early 2011, will not hamper efforts to improve the Times‘ distribution via social-media platforms. Reports paidContent:

The number of articles a reader will be able to access before the meter clicks in is still to be determined, but he echoed comments by other NYT execs that an article shared between Facebook users and other social sharing would probably remain free.

The workings of the Times‘ paywall have remained fairly obscure since the paper announced in January that it would implement an online subscription model. In the ensuing months, the Times has mainly been rebuffing concerns that any paywall would impose an onerous burden on its readers. Following the announcement that the Times was partnering with popular poll-analysis blog FiveThirtyEight, the paper quickly responded to paywall concerns by saying, “The majority of our readers will be unaffected when using the site and will continue to have the same experience they have always had.”

That statement has become something of a refrain for the Times. It deployed similar statements regarding inbound links from bloggers, traffic from search and traffic to the NYTimes.com front page.

Times executive editor Bill Keller has said that sporadic readers of the Times will probably never be asked to pay. But as news stories increasingly weave across the Internet and onto mobile platforms, the distinction between a sporadic reader and an avid one may not be as neat as the Times hopes. It doesn’t help that reader loyalty is not as bankable a proposition as it might once have been. As a result, drawing a line for the purpose of a subscription model is complicated, and the Times‘ recurring reassurances that most people will never have to worry about the paywall reflects that dissonance. (We’ve seen the Financial Times navigating similar territory, with some success, since its paywall went up.) After all, if the paywall does nothing, why bother putting it in place to begin with?

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