New York Times to charge

The New York Times has made the decision to charge for online content, according to New York magazine. This comes after "a year of sometimes fraught debate" inside the paper, according to the magazine. On the one hand, revenues at the venerable daily continue to deteriorate, as they are at every other media outlet these days because of the economy. On the other hand, expecting online readers to pay for what has been free until now is bound to drop readership. A good measure of that is the ego-hit the newspaper's columnists are bound to take. According to New York, star writers like Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd "grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership" the last time the Times experimented with putting their columns behind a pay wall in an ill-fated experiment known as TimesSelect.

Not long before the Times ultimately pulled the plug on TimesSelect, Friedman wrote [publisher Arthur] Sulzberger a long memo explaining that, while he was intially supportive of TimesSelect, he’d been alarmed that he had lost most of his readers in India and China and the Middle East.

Rather than simply erect a a pay wall such as the Wall Street Journal enforces, the Times will apparently go with a metered system similar to what some newspapers use, where readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The payment method the Times has chosen is apparently not the much-ballyhooed new micropayment platform Journalism Online, nor is it Google. Instead, according to New York, look for the Times to partner with Apple, which plans to launch its new tablet computer later this month. According to the magazine, "sources speculate that Sulzberger will strike a content partnership for the new device, which could dovetail with the paid strategy."