Scaling the pay wall

The New York Times has announced plans to charge users for access to its Web site, which no doubt will be greeted with unhappiness in some corners. After all, nobody wants to pay for something they’ve been getting for free.

The Mail Tribune’s parent company, News Corp, is headed on the same track, with the big boss, Rupert Murdoch, saying the time has come to quit giving away our content to anyone who has a Web connection. Murdoch is pushing this premise with his newspaper holdings in England, Australia and in the U.S. Of course, News Corp’s most famous U.S. holding, The Wall Street Journal, has long had one of the most successful pay walls among news organizations.

While the Journal has the advantage of selling a niche information source to an audience that is likely to consider the subscription price a cost of doing business, the path is less clear for most media outlets. Whether the concept would work for community newspapers like the Mail Tribune or even The Oregonian in Portland is still a big unknown. But we’ll know more soon.

Two of the Mail Tribune’s sister papers, The Stockton (Calif.) Record and The Standard Timesin New Bedford, Mass., have begun the process of requiring a paid subscription. We’ll be watching the results closely because we may very well be following along in the not-too-distant future.