NYTimes.com to charge for some content

The New York Times Co. yesterday said it will roll out an online subscription package called TimesSelect in September that will include access to columnists from its flagship Times newpaper and the affiliated International Herald Tribune. The subscription fee also will provide access to online archives and advanced looks on the NYTimes.com website at articles that will appear in some sections of the Sunday newspaper.

Priced at $49.95 a year, the service will effectively put behind a subscription wall more than 20 op-ed and news columnists, such as Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, Gretchen Morgenson, David Brooks, Joe Nocera, and Roger Cohen, whose writing now can be read for free on NYTimes.com and IHT.com, the International Herald Tribune's website. Most of the news and other features on those Times Co.-owned sites will remain free.

The move comes as news organizations struggle with how to position digital content. CNN.com, the Cable News Network website, yesterday said it will make free online video offerings, for which it had charged $12.99 a month, as it prepares a new paid video package.

Catherine J. Mathis, a Times Co. spokeswoman in New York, said the company is seeking to develop a new revenue stream based on premium content. ''Consistently, our surveys have shown that the op-ed columnists and the archives are two of the things that differentiate NYTimes.com from other websites," Mathis said.

Content from The Boston Globe, which also is owned by Times Co., will not be included in the TimesSelect package, she said.

Other features in TimesSelect will include audio and photo essays, video, and podcasts; TimesFile, a new tool that enables readers to tag and organize Times articles; and TimesNewstracker, an e-mail alert that lets readers track news important to them. NYTimes.com now charges for individual stories from its archives. The news tracker is now sold separately, but will be included in the TimesSelect package.

Home-delivery subscribers to the Times newspaper will automatically receive all of the features from TimesSelect.

Within the newspaper industry, which is fighting to attract both readers and advertisers, a fierce debate has been raging for years about whether to charge customers for online content or post it freely to draw in new readers and advertisers. Only two newspapers, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, have made money charging for their content, said Peter M. Zollman, founding principal of the Advanced Interactive Media Group, a consulting firm outside Orlando.

''Paid content online is still very much in a state of flux," Zollman said. ''Publishers hate giving content away for free, especially content that they have always charged for. On the other hand, they are making a lot of money wrapping advertising around content on the Web."

While some newspapers are moving to charge for some premium content, such as sports or lifestyle coverage, others that had attempted to charge are retreating. The Los Angeles Times, owned by Chicago's Tribune Co., recently restored free access to its entertainment section, which had been behind a subscription wall since 2003.

''More papers are looking at the approach The New York Times is taking -- keeping most of their content free but cherry-picking some content for a subscriptions service," said Steve Outing, a Poynter Institute senior editor tracking interactive media in Boulder, Colo.

Zollman said it might be tougher for newspapers with lesser-known columnists to sell subscriptions on the Times Co. model. ''Maureen Dowd and Tom Friedman are premium content," he said. ''You don't find those type of columnists at other newspapers."

While he applauded the TimesSelect move overall, Outing said he thinks it's a mistake to put the columnists behind a firewall. ''These days there are thousands of bloggers and news aggregators talking about the issues these columnists write about," he said. ''If you put them behind a firewall, they might disappear from those discussions."

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.