Globeandmail.com carried this Reuters story:

The New York Times Co. plans to stop charging Internet users for access to its columnists and Op-Ed pieces on a section of its Web site known as TimesSelect, The New York Post reported on Tuesday.

The Post, citing a source briefed on the matter, said a decision had been made by top Times executives. The timing of when the service would become free depends on technical issues, including revamping the software surrounding that section of the NYTimes.com site, according to the Post report.

A Times spokesman would not comment on the report, but said: "We continue to evaluate the best approach for NYTimes.com."

There is nothing I could see about this on the Times' site itself -- er, except for the Reuters story (brings to mind the ancient Dave Barry line about relying on the wire service to cover the mass murder in your lobby).

Paul Wells had this to say:

If the New York Times is going to stop charging for "premium" (i.e. not-dry-as-dust) content, then a lot of companies that use TimesCorp as a model for their online comportment will start questioning their own pay-as-you-go models.

I've believed from the beginning that you get a lot more advantage from being in a national conversation than you get from nickel-and-diming a radically smaller number of paying readers. Ad revenues pick up the slack, if there's any to pick up. Slate figured this out, what, nearly a decade ago. One of the many, many, many, many mistakes CanWest made (hi, Ray Heard!) when they bought Southam was to take National Post columnists off the website. It didn't drive a lot of online subscriptions; it just meant the rest of the country wasn't talking about us.

Matt Yglesias is right; over time, the market value of opinion journalism is trending lower, not higher, because the blogosphere clogs the ether with billions of free opinions. Which helps explain why some of us have travelled great distances to be forced back onto our perhaps atrophied reporting chops. Those chops are likelier to pay the rent, over the long term, than a snappy way with a wisecrack. Although I've got that too, if you want it.

Opinion is valueless. Everybody has an opinion.

Informed opinion actually has worth, and the more informed it is, the more worth it has. In that sense, Matt Yglesias is wrong and Wells is right.

The question is whether a publication can best capture value from that informed opinion by getting readers to pay for it directly or advertisers to pay for it indirectly.

Another thing is that the amount charged for a suscription people should rise with the quality of the news has only become a conceit in the Internet era; in pre-Internet times, the cost of a subscription -- while a welcome revenue stream -- was generally seen to be covering the cost of getting the paper to your door.

Given that the Internet slashes that cost, it reduces the logic of charging for delivery.

That being said, quality journalism -- even the pundit kind -- does cost. To me, it should be paid for -- although I concede I'm in a puny minority on this one.

 The NYT hasn't confirmed it's dumping the TimesSelect model, although it hasn't denied the move either.

Since the NYT has some of the best brand-name columnists out there, it's hard to imagine other newspaper websites (WSJ.com, anyone?) staying with a paid content model. A crack in the Globe Insider model occurred earlier this year, when the Globe and Mail allowed five and six-days-per-week newspaper subscribers to access columnists online (previously, you had to pay seven dollars per month on top of your subscription for the privilege).

Now, the big question is this: If everything is available for free on the Web, why charge for a newspaper subscription? And in the era of Craigslist, do newspaper classifieds really add value for the person doing the selling? If the answers to those questions are no and no, then the economics of newspapers suddenly become grim indeed.

Here's more pessimistic news about newspapers: By 2011, there will be more spending on online advertising than on newspapers in the United States, according to this BizReport.com story. That story indicates that online ad revenue will already pass newspaper revenue this year in Sweden and Britain.

Need more bad news? According to the Online Publishers of the U.K., newspaper readers those online access was easier than print, although they still like their newspapers, according to a BizReport.com story.

In a 2006 Wall Street Journal article, Globe e-i-c Edward Greenspon had this to say about newspapers:

 "Newspapers are falling off the cliff," he says. "But we're at the back."

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the NYT, reportedly said at this year's Davos Forums that the NYT might not publish on paper in five years, "and you know what? I don't really care, either." More in this AJR article. The closer from that story:

Sulzberger may have exaggerated a little bit back in January, but the spirit behind his words still stands. The challenge is not about the date the printing presses shut down; it's about the day newspapers' print customers and advertisers can no longer support the costs of journalism. Whether that day is five or ten years down the road, it's coming.

I'm going to think about this overnight, but I suspect this current issue may well reverberated on the print side as well as online.