By Nina Mandell
DNAinfo Producer/Reporter
MANHATTAN — NYTimes.com readers won’t be getting their news for free anymore.
The New York Times announced that it will charge readers for access to its Web site starting early next year.
In 2011, visitors to the Times Web site will get a certain number of articles free every month but will have to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site.
The Times hasn’t decided how much it would cost or what the limit would be on the number of articles available for free. Executives stressed that the amount of free access could change with time, in response to economic conditions and reader demand.
“This announcement allows us to begin the thought process that’s going to answer so many of the questions that we all care about,” Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the company chairman and publisher of the newspaper, said in an interview with a Times reporter. “We can’t get this halfway right or three-quarters of the way right. We have to get this really, really right.”
NYTimes.com has more than 17 million readers a month in the United States, according to Nielsen Online, and analysts say it is easily the leader in online advertising revenue, as well.
This would not be the first time the company has attempted an online pay model. In the 1990s it charged overseas readers.
A second attempt from 2005 to 2007 came with the newspaper’s TimesSelect service, which charged for access to editorials and columns. TimesSelect attracted about 210,000 subscribers who paid $49.95 a year but was scrapped in an aim to take advantage of a predicted boom in online advertising.
The Times is the fourth major New York newspaper to put up a pay wall.
The Wall Street Journal makes certain articles accessible only to subscribers, while Newsday’s entire Web site is available only to subscribers. The Financial Times, which enacted one of the first Web pay walls on their site in 2002, allows non-paying readers to see up to 10 articles a month.
