New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee gave details on her Twitter feed of the paper's discussions at a strategy presentation to staff yesterday on how the Times might charge for online content, amongst other things. The meeting for news staff was held at the company's Manhattan based headquarters, reported the Guardian.

Her 'tweets' indicated that the NYT is considered introducing a tiered membership scheme, which was compared to an American Express credit card membership with different levels such as platinum and gold. The paper is also "rethinking the assumption that home delivery subscribers get access to everything," and thinking of membership as a "brand building product, not online product."

According to Lee's messages, the NYT has been taking a good look at TimesSelect, its brief attempt to charge for some online content in 2007, to see what it can learn. Executives seem to have concluded that the way it was marketed was not particularly effective, as there was a general belief that the whole site was paid. It was also the fact that something that had been free was taken away that was objectionable. Other industry veterans such as the AP's Jim Kennedy have expressed a reluctance to block off free content, suggesting that a better solution is to introduce new products for a fee rather than charging for existing free ones.

In terms of funding, Lee wrote that the NYT has rejected raising endowments and individual donations but is "still looking at underwriting content." The paper is apparently looking at alternative sources of revenue, such as business-to-business opportunities which could include, for example, selling research to the Fortune 1000. The company also believes it can "create significant revenue streams from APIs," given that it estimates that NYT content is viewed 2.5 times as much off the paper's website as on it.

Lee reported executives saying that the paper receives an advertising premium for being "one of the largest" news sites on the web, and has concluded that advertising and subscriptions "do not appear to coexist in web space," though exactly what this means is not clear. With regards to other sites using NYT content, executives contemplated the possibility of a third option in addition to just leaving it or taking legal action: a way to force advertising providers to automatically give a cut of ad revenue made on third party sites directly to the copyright holder.

Progress towards mass charging for newspapers' online content has grown significantly in recent weeks. Rupert Murdoch of News Corp just announced that he plans to charge for online content in all of his media empire's newspapers within a year, and start-up Journalism Online is aiming to develop a system to help newspapers charge online more easily via joint subscriptions or micropayments for individual articles. Therefore it is not surprising that the New York Times is seriously considering its options in this area, particularly considering its parent company's widely publicised financial difficulties. It will be extremely interesting to see what sort of plan, if any, is put into action.

Source: Twitter, Guardian