Up until this week, The New York Times has been vague about its plans to erect an online pay wall starting in early 2010. Maybe they should have kept it that way.

All we knew was that The Times would follow the Financial Times model—i.e., a metered-access system where site visitors can to read a fixed number of articles for free before they hit the pay wall.

Now, The Times is starting to share more details of its plans, but instead of striking a clear, consistent chord, we’re hearing a cacophony of mixed messages.

Speaking at the PaidContent 2010 conference at the Times’ headquarters in New York, chairman and publisher Arthur Sulzberger, president and CEO Janet Robinson and senior VP of digital operations Martin Nisenholtz entertained questions from journalists. Reuters’ Felix Salmon asked whether Times branded blogs such as Freakonomics and Paul Krugman’s blog would be counted toward the quota, to which Mr. Nisenholtz responded that Times’ blogs would be behind the pay wall.

As Mr. Salmon pointed out in a blog posting of his own, this decision by The Times raises uncomfortable possibilities, including:

• Readers who participate in the Freakonomics comments section will be prompted to subscribe to the full New York Times online package in order to post.
• The Times will be allowing free access to site visitors who follow links from external blogs to NYTimes.com stories (as the company said it would do), while potentially not allowing the same access to visitors who arrive at a Times story via a Times blog.

When panel moderator Staci Kramer of PaidContent.org’s ContentNext Media pressed the panelists on the latter point, Mr. Nisenholtz alluded to a Google system that would cap the number of “first-link-free” stories that site visitors could read on NYTimes.com. Mr. Sulzberger added that The Times wasn’t interested in building “a system that just tries to please 5%-7% of the audience,” referring to “side-door” entrants who arrive at NYTimes.com from third-party sites.

This strategy seems destined to drive away readers. The blogosphere is the epitome of free media, and possibly the last thing that The Times should put behind its pay wall. Other sources of content—in-depth news analyses, crossword puzzles, archives, even video—seem like things that people would be willing to pay for. But blogs?

In the year they have to figure this out, let’s hope The Times leaders see the light. Otherwise, they might end up with TimesSelect déjà vu all over again.

Retailers in all product categories have a place in mobile commerce. For mobile commerce to gain critical mass, consumers must be able to at least access the Internet from their mobile phones.

We recently spoke with eMarketer senior analyst Jeffrey Grau about the state of m-commerce.

(Read more…)

We recently spoke with Brian Cooper, the creative director of UK digital agency Dare. Here’s a snippet from the full interview, in which Cooper chats about Dare’s approach to marketing in a digital age, and the agency’s recent work for Vodafone. (Read more…)

Earlier this month, Ad Age published some remarkable statistics from Edelman: just one-quarter of consumers “view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company,” a number that has dropped by nearly one-half since 2008. While trust in newspapers and radio was also down, it remained higher than faith in peers.

(Read more…)

The Mobile World Congress wrapped up this week in Barcelona. As expected, it saw a flurry of new device launches and a big focus on mobile applications, despite no official presence from Apple, whose App Store is the market heavyweight. For those of us who couldn’t make the trip to Spain (where, as many observers have noted, it was cold and rainy), PCWorld and mocoNews both have good slideshows of the festivities.

Among the many announcements made at the show, a few are worth highlighting: (Read more…)