The debate is still the same: whether newspapers should offer readers free content online or ask for payment. That was the theme of the conference "Paywall Strategies 2011" held in London on February 24, which concluded that, although there are a lot of simple things in life, developing a paid content model - no matter from which angle you look at it - is not one of them.

And paywalls themselves are not straightforward: they could be strictly impenetrable, like those at Murdoch's News International properties, or permable, like the one The New York Times is expected to launch soon.

Mary Beth Christie, head of product management at the Financial Times, who attended the conference, said about the FT mutualised model: "Like the best systems, ours is simple. It gives users freedom of choice to consume media between the paper, the tablet and mobile. We allow our users complete freedom to read our content as they wish", adding that "the goldmine is not paying for the content, the goldmine is building greater reader engagement over time", the Media Briefing reported.

A hybrid strategy, similar to that of the FT and the NYT, will seemingly be adopted by the Telegraph Media Group, which might start to charge online in September.

More than a year since the paper announced plans to charge for access, Arthur Sulzberger, chairman and publisher of The New York Times, said at the Financial Times Digital Media conference that the NYT would unveil its metered model "very shortly", as the Guardian reported.

Readers will be asked to pay for the site once they have accessed an as yet unspecified number of articles a month, but referrals from other sites would not count towards this toll, the article wrote.

The Guardian reported that when asked whether he was confident that customers are prepared to pay for general news, as opposed to the specialised business news offered by the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, Sulzberger said the New York Times's international reach produces content worth paying for.

Sulzberger would not be drawn on the NYT's relationship with Apple and the latter's new offer to publishers to sell app subscriptions through the App Store, a fact that has concerned many other publishers, not least Pearson, the parent company of the Financial Times.

Sources: The Media Briefing, the Guardian