The British newspaper The Sunday Times will become the guinea pig for testing paid access to the newspaper, reported the Bangkok Post in “Sunday Times to test charge for content”. News Corp owns The Sunday Times, The Times and The Wall Street Journal and already charges for access to the latter.
You could say it’s a sign of The Times. I’m no fan of paying for access to online news, but as newspapers all over shut their doors, we’re likely to see more of this.
The interesting thing to me, though, is that newspapers for years supported themselves by advertizing. Very few modern newspapers have kept themselves running on subscriptions alone, and certainly no large ones that I’m aware of. It seems odd that this aspect hasn’t translated well in the online world.
Makes you wonder how much longer free news broadcasts from the major networks will be available. Will they start charging for those at some point? I certainly hope not, seeing as none of them are worth paying for.