You might be aware that the New York Times will start charging for content soon. Today they said the auspicious date would be March 28th in the US. It looks like they’re going to allow you to read 20 articles per month for free and then offer a tiered payment system, maxing out at $35 per month for bundled access to the New York Times website, the mobile app and the iPad app.
What you may not know is that you’ll still have the ability to read articles the New York Times simply by pasting the URL of an article into a search engine, or through links in Facebook and Twitter. As NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. explains:
â€Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit. For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of free links to Times articles.â€
Leaving workarounds intact reduces the chance that this move serves to marginalize the Times. Still, anyone else amazed at this level of pragmatism?