The NY Times has announced that it will resurrect a paywall for its online content, sending media geeks and commentators’ fingers flying over whether it will work and What It All Means. Crikey intern Flint Duxfield takes a look at what they’re saying.
Paywalls
NY Times reveals its paywall plans
The New York Times unveils its plans for the future of NYTimes.com: readers will get a flat number of free articles per month before having to pay.
rumour 
New York Times to go paywall
New York magazine claims the New York Times is soon to announce that it will start charging readers for access to its website, adopting a “metered system” (ie x number of articles free per day, pay for the rest) akin to that of the Financial Times.
HuffPo and Politico prove the net does pay
While many newspapers are struggling, online news organisations HuffPo and Politico are reporting multimillion dollar revenue and new jobs. Can companies like Yahoo learn from them?
Simons: Content makers come to grips with the big grapple
Margaret Simons’s round-up of this year’s biggest media industry news, movers, shakers and changes.
Ninemsn nails its colours to the mast: information should be free
Ninemsn news executive producer Hal Crawford has written a distinctly bolshie blog post arguing that Rupert Murdoch’s paywall push is a threat to freedom, reports Margaret Simons. Given it’s the most popular news website in the country, that’s no small thing.
Crikey Says: Murdoch, the savior, might kill what’s worth saving
If journalism needs to be saved, is Rupert Murdoch the right person to save it?
Variety goes paywall
There goes another one: entertainment industry bible Variety is putting up a paywall tomorrow. It’s an icon of the industry, but with a $248-a-year subscription fee, its real cachet will be put to the test.
must read 
Murdoch: Quality journalism ain’t dead, but it ain’t free either
Technology is not to blame for the death of newspapers, because media businesses just have to adjust to what their readers want. But if readers won’t pay then they are thieves, says Rupert Murdoch.
Murdoch’s bold new world of journalism
Rupert Murdoch gave a speech on Tuesday that gives a few more hints as to how he sees the future of news businesses, including further information about the News Limited e-reader plans.
The sites already making paywalls work
With all the huffing and puffing over Murdoch’s plan to paywall his News Corp sites, you’d think no-one had ever actually done it before. But there are plenty of sites on the Web already making paywalls work for them. We can think of at least one…
Arianna Huffington: Suck it up, Rupert
Murdoch and his offsiders have called news aggregators “parasites,” “content kleptomaniacs”, and “tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet”. Enough with the name calling, says Arianna Huffington.
Google limits access to free news
Google News has announced it will allow online news sites to limit the number of articles readers can view free through Google News searches to five a day with its “First Click Free” program. Is the search giant selling out to The Man?
Murdoch lieutenant: “Free costs too much”
The CEO of News Corp publisher Dow Jones, Les Hinton, has — surprise, surprise — come out in defence of the company’s move to paywall all its content, denouncing the “false gospel of the web”: “We were promised that eyeballs meant advertising, clicks meant cash”.
In defence of paywalls
We can’t go on pretending that quality online journalism costs nothing, says journalism professor Tim Luckhurst. Thousands of journalists have already lost their jobs — paywalls are the industry’s only hope to restore some sanity.
Rival publishers unite to create iTunes for magazines — but who’s buying?
Magazine publishers Hearst, Time Inc and Conde Nast are joining forces to create an “iTunes for magazines” — a online storefront for digital versions of their titles and articles. But they can’t sell a product that’s already free… are those paywalls we can see looming on the horizon?
What will it take to get people paying for online news?
There’s movement at the station: Rupe is dumping Google, Journalism Online has 1200 publishers on-board, and Time is creating an iTunes for magazine articles. What’s next on the path to making paywalls prosperous?
More publishers join Murdoch’s War on Google
Publishers of the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News are planning to de-index their news articles from Google, emulating Rupert Murdoch’s plans to cut the search off from News Corp content.
The Times reveals its paywall plans
As News Corp sites prepare to erect paywalls around their content, the editor of the UK’s Times has finally revealed some bricks-and-mortar information about what it will be doing and when.
Tim O’Reilly: The War for the Web is just getting started
Murdoch’s threat to take News Corp content out of Google’s results in just the beginning, says tech publisher Tim O’Reilly: big players like Facebook, Apple, and, yes, News Corp, are breaking off bits of the Web for themselves — and they won’t always want to share.
Why Murdoch won’t ditch Google
Rupert Murdoch’s threat to pull all News Corp sites from Google’s search index may not be as dire for the mastheads as many are predicting — but chances are he won’t follow through on it anyway: he’ll just erect even higher paywalls.
How Murdoch can really hurt Google
Rupert Murdoch’s recent rejection of Google may be less about news content and more about the search engine wars, suggests Michael Arrington: by de-indexing from Google, other search engines could pay him for the rights to index News Corp content.
Why Murdoch may be more right than wrong about Google
mUmBRELLA’s Tim Burrowes asks if Rupert Murdoch has a point in thumbing his nose at Google and locking News Ltd’s content behind a paywall — maybe Google traffic isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Rupert Murdoch: the internet does not exist
As of a year ago, Rupert Murdoch had never even used Google — so maybe he doesn’t realise that by cutting News Corp off from it, the organisation will cease to exist, writes Michael Wolff.
Dear Rupert, this is how the internet works. Google it.
Rupert Murdoch may be rich, clever and influential, but his plan to remove News Corp content from Google’s index is just daft. If he wants us to read his stories, let alone pay for them, we have to be able to find them first.
