A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

ONE WOULD THINK THEY'D ASK KRUGMAN FIRST: The New York Times may try a new pay-for-content scheme:

Executive editor Bill Keller said at a meeting with staff on Wednesday that two proposals are being strongly considered.

One includes a "meter system," in which the reader can roam freely on the Web site until hitting a predetermined limit of word-count or pageviews, after which a meter will start running and the reader is charged for movement on the site thereafter. He warned staff at the meeting that this pay model would be "tricky." If the word-count limit or page-view limit is set too low, it could chase readers off, compromising traffic and advertising revenue. He said the site presently makes "a lot, a lot of money" from digital advertising—though he wouldn't specify how much—and that executives at the paper believe it is "substantially more" than The Wall Street Journal currently makes on a subscription-based pay model. On the other hand, he said, set these bars too high and there will be little improvement in revenue.

Mr. Keller described the second proposal as a "membership" system. In this model, readers pledge money to the site and are invited into a "New York Times community." You write a check, you get a baseball cap or a T-shirt (if it's like Channel Thirteen, a tote bag!), an invite to a Times event, or perhaps, like The Economist, access to specialized content on the Web. He said he wouldn't even be opposed to offering a donor access to a Page One editorial meeting as long as it doesn't affect the paper competitively.

Some day, someone's going to figure out how to make online journalism profitable. I hope.