New York Times could try again to charge for content

Rupert Murdoch, what hath thou wrought?

After floating the idea that the rest of his publishing empire could follow in the footsteps of the Wall Street Journal and begin charging for content, now the venerable New York Times thinks it might be able to get in on the act... again.

To be sure, the Times has been savaged by the economy in recent years (its stock is down about 90 percent since 2003), but is erecting a pay wall to one of the world's most venerable brands -- a second time -- a wise idea? The Times already tried walling off certain parts of its website (namely archives and opinion columns) through the so-called TimesSelect service. But that experiment was essentially a failure (despite receiving nearly half a million subscribers) and the Times re-opened its entire website to everyone in late 2007.

Yet that may change again in the near future.

In a meeting with shareholders (as reported via Twitter by a Times staff writer), the company is now said to be "exploring a new online financial strategy" that could introduce membership levels that gives users varying levels of access to the website, explores new ways to penalize thieves who reprint the newspaper's content without permission, and develops ways to dramatically increase traffic to the website and thus increase advertising revenues along the way.

The really interesting thing here is how the Times has come to reflect on TimesSelect nearly two years after the fact: As the Guardian notes, the implication from the corporate brass is not that the service was a failure on its own merits, but because it wasn't positioned properly from a marketing perspective and thus received a lot of bad publicity. Could the Times really be planning to give TimesSelect a second try? And would consumers really give that a second chance?