• Daily Finance, Wednesday, May 26, 2010 12:04 AM

The New York Times announced in January that it would start charging for online content in early 2011. Will the pay wall the newspaper is building scare away the paper's natural allies -- bloggers who like to link to the site? That's the question Daily Finance is asking.

A new study on news and social media from the Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at which outlets are linked to most frequently by blogs. Overwhelmingly, it found, bloggers draw on a handful of traditional-media sources for their links. Remarkably, just four outlets account for a full 80% of those links: the BBC, CNN, the Times and the Washington Post.  Note: The Wall Street Journal, because it has a pay wall, is not among them.

What does this mean? For starters, it's another nail in the coffin of the so-called Long Tail theory of Internet-enabled consumption, which says that search, social networks, artificial intelligence and other technologies will lead consumers to explore overlooked products and content. News organizations at the very top of the food chain are essentially in a different business than everyone else. The dynamics of the Internet naturally work to amplify their audiences into mega-audiences.

This, surely, represents a rare opportunity. But at The New YorkTimes, at least, the emphasis seems to be less on exploiting it than on figuring out how to monetize the fraction of its readership (19% according to the study, that will cough up for full access.

Separately, The London Times and Sunday Times newspapers unveiled Tuesday their new Web sites as they prepare to become the first in Britain to charge online readers for content. Both papers are owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. The new sites -- www.thetimes.co.uk and www.thesundaytimes.co.uk -- replace the single timesonline.co.uk site for the two papers. Readers who register will be able to access the sites for free until late June, after which they must pay one pound ($1.40, 1.2 euros) for the daily Times and two pounds for a week's subscription, reports The Times.

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