The New York Times to start charging for online content

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The New York Times is reporting that The New York Times "will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations." The New York Times is presumably in a good position to be "familiar with internal deliberations" at The New York Times. The decision of The New York Times to start charging for access to online content follows "a year of sometimes fraught debate inside the paper."

While I understand the need to "do anything we can to raise money," as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman put it, I suspect that, once the charging begins, I will have little to nothing to do with The New York Times online. And I hope that readers around the world send the same message.

After all, do we really need The New York Times in our lives? Is is really such an essential media outlet? And do we really need to pay for it? It is arrogance and delusion to think that The New York Times is so important that people will pay for it.

Perhaps declining readership will let the geniuses at The New York Times know that this is a terrible idea.