Times law blogger withdraws from site over paywall plans

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A lawyer who has written for the Times for the past three years has withdrawn his blog from the paper's website, because of its paywall plans.

Barrister and writer Tim Kevan's BabyBarista blog , a fictional account of a junior barrister at the English bar, has appeared on the Times for more than three years. The Times and Sunday Times, which launched new websites last week , will introduced a site-wide paywall later this month offering access to the sites for £1 a day, £2 per week or as part of a print subscription.

"I have today withdrawn the BabyBarista Blog from the Times in reaction to their plans to hide it away behind a paywall along with their other content. Now don’t get me wrong. I have absolutely no problem with the decision to start charging. They can do what they like. But I didn’t start this blog for it to be the exclusive preserve of a limited few subscribers. I wrote it to entertain whosoever wishes to read it. Hence my decision to resign which I made with regret," writes Kevan on the BabyBarista site .

"I remain extremely grateful to the Times for hosting the blog for the last three years and wish them luck with their experiment." In a follow-up post , Kevan suggests that the Times' legal coverage may suffer from the new paywall model and a reduced audience, creating an opportunity for the Guardian's recently launched law section of its website. He adds that the decision to bring in a paywall across both sites will be "a disaster": "There are so many innovative ways of making cash online and the decision to plump for an across-the-board blanket subscription over the whole of their content makes them look like a big lumbering giant, unable to cope with the diversification of the media brought about by online content, blogging, Facebook, Twitter - the list is endless. Canute-like in their determination to stop the tide of free content and using a top down strategy which makes even the Post Office look dynamic."

At a pre-launch event last Monday, the Times' executive editor Daniel Finklestein said the paper was "unashamed" about asking readers to pay to support its journalism and columnists. He said he and other columnists would continue to circulate and share links to their work via social networks such as Twitter, despite directing followers to an item beyond a paywall. Without a different revenue model, those articles and columnists cannot be sustained he said: "They will not go viral; they will go out of business. I'm quite happy for my column to be read by people who are prepared to pay for it (…) I will absolutely be twittering links to remind people how excellent it is and to encourage them to pay for it." A promotional video for the new site features many of the paper's high profile columnists and no suggestion that the paywall plans could cause writers to leave was made. A spokeswoman for the Times declined to comment on BabyBarista's departure.