New York Times to charge for content from 2011

21 Jan 2010

The New York Times announced yesterday that it intended to charge frequent readers for access to its Web site.

Starting in early 2011, visitors to nytimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access, the newspaper said.

Subscribers to the newspaper's print edition will receive full access to the site.

However, the plan is still at a nascent stage and the paper has not yet decided on the fundamentals like how much it would cost or what the limit would be on free reading.

''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, was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

''We can't get this halfway right or three-quarters of the way right. We have to get this really, really right,'' he said in the interview.