It’s ‘Times’ for a change

   We will soon be paying the piper for more than a decade of free: The New York Times announced last week it will begin charging to view its online content in 2011.
   Unlike when governments and corporations try to reach into the collective pocket of consumers, it's next to impossible to call this greed based.
   The print news industry as a whole is malnourished. When a human being is deprived of food, it begins feasting on the fat and energy it has stored up, but that can only last so long. The Times, much like many publications across the country, has been chipping away at its collective stored fat, downsizing, and laying off as the transition away from print continues.
   The Kaiser Family Foundation's study "Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-year-olds" found that over a typical day people in this age range consume an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes a day across mediums such as TV, computers, video games, music, print and cell phones. Consumption increased for all these categories except for, you guessed it, print.
   This is the new generation of news consumers, and they're insatiable. For any media organization to succeed it has to whet the collective appetite and the print product is looking as appetizing to consumers as Brussels sprouts. 
   With unemployment hovering around 10% and the economy in the proverbial toilet, forcing people to pay for something they are conditioned to know as free is no enviable task. Unlike the "too big to fail banks," there's no stimulus package for this cornerstone of information.
   The details of the plan released on the Times' Media Decoder blog and in subsequent articles were reasonable and it addressed some of the main concerns of the casual reader.
   Under the plan, if you already have a home subscription, you get free Web site access. Otherwise, you'll have to pay for access after a certain amount of page visits.
   The Times is still heavily leveraging the print product, but letting its Web presence be compromised by something that people are gravitating away from makes very little sense.
   "We can't get this halfway right or three-quarters of the way right. We have to get this really, really right," said Times Company chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. in paper's article announcing the change.
   Other intermingling of internet and payment plans have been attempted and abandoned. Times Select, a previous payment model, was abandoned "because search was becoming a bigger factor and advertising was more robust," according to a recent post by executive editors on the Media Decoder blog.
   Sulzberger Jr.'s deliberate approach with this new plan isn't in the spirit of the internet and it's where the plan falls apart. I applaud Sulzberger Jr. standing up for the financial well being of an American institution, but the timing is all wrong.
   Do the executives at the New York Times honestly believe that with how rapidly technology changes, especially online, that the internet ecosystem they are planning for now will be the same in a year?