The New York Times plans to start charging for some of its online content on January 1, 2011, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
The decision to start charging had been revealed previously. Times Executive Editor Bill Keller gave the date certain at a media event last week.
Earlier, the Times said that it would start a "metered model," under which the newspaper's website "will offer users free access to a set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number."
A couple of years ago, they tried to put their editorial/op-ed content behind a pay wall, and the plan failed miserably and they opened it up.
The whole debacle of newspapers posting all their previously paid print content online has been one of the major problems for newspapers in the Internet era. At the time they did it, the thinking was that they had to give away their content to capture "eyeballs," and that they would figure out how to get paid later. They never did, and now they find themselves with millions of readers who have become addicted to free access to journalist-produced content -- which is quite expensive to produce.
If anyone can pioneer a limited revenue model, it's the Times. They aren't the greatest newspaper in the world for nothing. They innovated many elements of the media that we have long taken for granted, such as the op-ed page and front-page news summaries.
The real question is how much they could possibly generate with this metered model, and whether it will contribute in a meaningful way to the high cost of newsgathering.
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