ANN ALTHOUSE: We’re going to have to pay to read the NYT on line. “For me, reading on line is tied to blogging. I’m not going to spend my time reading sites that I can’t blog, and I’m not going to blog and link to sites that you can’t read without paying. Currently, I link to the NYT a lot, perhaps several times a day. I don’t know how much of their traffic is sent their way from blogs, but it’s one more factor that will limit their readership. You’d think what a newspaper would want most is readers, both to influence and to sell to advertisers. I know they need to make money, but I wish advertising was the way. Once they close themselves off — as they did once before with the failure known as TimesSelect — they sacrifice readers and lose appeal for advertisers.”

You have to make money somehow. Is this the way to do it? I’m skeptical, but in a way I’d like to be wrong, as there don’t appear to be any generally applicable schemes for making money from news on the Web.

UPDATE: More thoughts from Jeff Jarvis. “But note the verb that started off the paragraph above: should. Readers who read more should pay more. This is the product of journalism’s sense of entitlement. “