Monday, January 18, 2010

If you’re a fan of the New York Times and enjoy reading its content online with a cup of Java in the morning, get ready to pay for the privilege.

New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is said to be close to announcing the paper will begin charging for access to its website, this according to people familiar with internal deliberations. After a year of spirited debate inside the paper, the choice for sometime has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system.

One personal friend of Sulzberger said a final decision could come within days, and a senior newsroom source agreed, adding that the plan could be announced in a matter of weeks. It will likely be months before the Times begins to charge for access to its content, perhaps sometime this spring. Executive Editor Bill Keller declined to comment. Times spokesperson Diane McNulty said: “We’ll announce a decision when we believe that we have crafted the best possible business approach. No details till then.”

The decision to go paid is monumental for the Times, and culminates a yearlong debate that grew contentious, people close to the talks say. In favor of a paid model were Keller and managing editor Jill Abramson. Nisenholtz and former deputy managing editor Jon Landman, who was until recently in charge of nytimes.com, advocated for a free site.

But with the painful declines in advertising brought on by last year’s financial crisis, the argument pushed by Keller and others that online advertising might never grow big enough to sustain the paper’s high-cost, ambitious journalism gained more weight. The view was that the Times needed to make the leap to some form of paid content and it needed to do it now.

An earlier attempt to shake down its readers called the TimesSelect, backfired on the paper and lead to a diminished audience for the paper’s star columnists like Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd. The paper abandoned the hugely unpopular pay scheme and returned to free access.