NYTimes Confirms It Will Start Charging For Online News In 2011

jmtpi writes "The article is frustratingly vague, but the New York Times is confirming earlier speculation that it will start charging online readers who visit the site regularly. Occasional users will still get free access to a certain number of articles per month. Most of the key details are not yet determined, but the system is scheduled to be deployed at the beginning of next year." The Times is planning on rolling its own pay system, and it will doubtless use the rest of 2010 to look at how sites like the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times fare before deciding on specifics. How often do you readers typically hit articles at nytimes.com in a given month? We try to avoid linking to stories behind paywalls when possible, and if the Times chooses a low monthly limit, you'll probably see a lot fewer links to their site — which would be a shame.

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Re:The grey lady should look before leaping

[PCM2]

The story you linked at the Guardian is by Scott Rosenberg, an actual Salon employee who was close to the Salon Premium effort. As a corollary, here is an older article I commissioned from Scott for Web Techniques magazine in 2001, when the Salon paywall was just going up. It includes some technical details, but mostly it's just interesting to see the bookends of the initial optimism and later disillusionment with the effort.

P.S. Interesting that Scott's lede was, "The Web's great free-for-all is coming to a sudden, sharp end." Not so sudden, I guess, but perhaps even more sharp than expected.