Recently, the New York Times e-mailed a survey to its print subscribers to ask how they felt about paying for online content. For access to its website, nytimes.com, they are considering charging a monthly fee of $5.00 to view articles, blogs and multimedia.
Right now it is all free. That's a hard model to back away from and expect users to stpay. Will there be added value?
While all print media is having problems, some are moving to the web with some success. It can't all be free - that's no "business" model.
The Rocky Mountain News shut down. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer became a web-only publication. The business model has been to run online advertising, but that probably can't fund full news services. Subscriptions - sort of a cable TV versus free broadcast TV model - is hardly a new idea.
I don't have the answer for them, but I don't think this recycled ideas are it.
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