New York Times to start meter ticking soon

March update on The New York Times progress on its plans to try to extract some income from online readers, originally planned for a January launch, eventually rescheduled to March 28.

The bottom line: The home delivery price still includes access to all digital versions. For the rest of us, NYTimes.com offers 20 free articles each calendar month as well as the Top News, home page, section fronts, blog fronts and classifieds. After that, the Times will want $15 every four weeks for unlimited access via Web and smartphone, $20 for tablets. (There’s promise of a “special introductory offer” on March 28, and some fine print about crosswords and e-reader editions.)

• Newsonomics of The New York Times Pay Fence — Ken Doctor, author of Newsonomics, comments at Nieman Lab on the Times good timing: bringing its pay model online during the successful launch of the iPad2 “and a growing sense of the Times’ outsized importance as media chaos multiplies.”
• The Times Announces Digital Subscription Plan — (Jeremy W. Peters,  NYT Business Day / Media & Advertising) — The New York Times introduced a plan on Thursday to begin charging the most frequent users of its Web site $15 for a four-week subscription in a bet that readers will pay for news they are accustomed to getting free. (March 17, 2011)
• Times Letter to Readers — About digital subscriptions. (March 17, 2011)
• The Times’s Online Pay Model Was Years in the Makng — (Jeremy W. Peters,  NYT Business Day / Media & Advertising) — The New York Times’s online pay model, which takes effect on March 28, may be the most watched experiment in American journalism. (March 21, 2011)
• Paying for The Times at SXSW — (NYT Mediadecoder Blog) The New York Times, my employer, had just announced that it was about to implement a metered model, charging its most frequent visitors… March 20, 2011)
• Business News You Didn’t Read Here — NYT Public Editor Arthur Brisbane on other media outlets’ coverage of the Times plans to introduce a pay model for some of its online news. (March 5, 2011)

Earlier information:

TheCutline blog at Yahoo, Feb 3: New York Times will release paywall details in ‘near future’

Media Daily, Jan. 28: New York Times Rushes to Shore Up Pay Wall Model

A little over a month before The New York Times’ new pay wall for online content is set to debut, the newspaper publisher is rushing to iron out technical glitches in the system for administering paid access to the Web site, according to Bloomberg, which reported that NYTCO has already fixed 500 problems revealed by tests — but still has about 200 more to go before the pay wall is ready for rollout.

Wall Street Journal, Jan. 24: New York Times Readies Pay Wall

Paper will charge for bundled digital service, allow some free access

On Jan. 17 the Times ran a story about pay models in general, particularly Steven Brill’s Journalism Online experiment, with an optimistic headline: Under Pay Model, Little Effect Seen on Papers’ Web Traffic. It linked back to the original announcement of the Times own plan, which was mentioned late in the story:

The New York Times will become the largest American newspaper to employ a subscriber option for its Web site when it begins a system early this year to charge the heaviest users of NYTimes.com.

Here’s that Times story from last year: The Times to Charge for Frequent Access to Its Web Site

Same day, from The Wall Street Journal: New York Times Announces Long-Awaited Pay Model for Web Site