New York Times to charge for online access from 2011. Photo: Andy Soloman

Has the bullet been bitten? Or is the bullet winging its way to the heart of its mark?

The announcement by top US newspaper, The New York Times, that starting January 2011 it will charge frequent users of its website has either been heralded by underfire newspaper execs, or derided as a desperate measure that will hasten the venerable institution’s demise.

The NYT‘s David Carr, in the Times’ Media Decoder blog, said the move represented a hedge.

People who remain reflexively bullish on free [content] ignore the fact that the clock is ticking on many of the legacy businesses that produce that content. The new approach is an effort to replace that ticking clock with a meter, and its success is not assured but to sit still would be dumb.

It is not the job of The New York Times or any other mainstream media company to give away its content until it can no longer afford to do so.

The charging plans appear fairly draconian. From next January visitors will be able to view a few articles free each month, but step over the threshold and they will be required to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the daily or Sunday print editions will continue to receive full access.

The NYT has yet to say how much it intends to charge, or how many articles will remain free each month.

Newspapers have been grappling with plummeting circulations and advertising revenues. Readers have increasingly turned away from being brand loyal to being increasingly varied in choosing how they access their general news. The Internet, RSS feeds or news aggregators are able to through up numerous sources to information on any particular news story.

Yes, gathering news is an expensive business, but increasingly readers have been opting for free services to keep up with developments. As circulations decline, so advertisers look elsewhere. It’s worth noting that the the New York Times Company, which also includes the International Herald Tribune and 15 other daily newspapers, saw advertising revenue plunge 30% in the first nine months of 2009.

No doubt, this is a brave move by the NYT, but with technology, reader behaviour and news sources exploding by the month (think Twitter and other social networks, think of the boom in citizen journalism, and think cost) it is hard to see whether come next January the NYT is part of a crowd rushing to harvest online dollars or whether it finds itself back tracking as the “loyal” online  readers it wants to monetise dessert it for somewhere else.

As Reuters media reporter Felix Salmon wrote (and which was reported in the NYT):

Successful media companies go after audience first, and then watch revenues follow; failing ones alienate their audience in an attempt to maximize short-term revenues.”

So, is the NYT going to charge into battle only to find its followers have quietly disappeared? Will its brazen war cry fade into a garbled mumble? Or has it struck gold? My take is that it is not enough for legacy newspaper businesses to think they can easily transfer the model into a successful online business. They need to find ways to serve up the exclusive essential information that people will be willing to pay for.

This isn’t the first time the NYT has charged for acces. Back in the 1990s it charged overseas readers and then again a few years ago it tried another scheme to charge poeple for reading the op-ed columns. Both failed to gain any significant traction and were dropped.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The New York Times Announces Plans for a Metered Model for NYTimes.com in 2011 (eon.businesswire.com)
• The NYT’s paywall (blogs.reuters.com)
• New York Times to charge online readers (guardian.co.uk)