This is important, if true -- and as an old Financial Post colleague used to say, "All rumours are true." If the New York Times is going to stop charging for "premium" (i.e. not-dry-as-dust) content, then a lot of companies that use TimesCorp as a model for their online comportment will start questioning their own pay-as-you-go models.

I've believed from the beginning that you get a lot more advantage from being in a national conversation than you get from nickel-and-diming a radically smaller number of paying readers. Ad revenues pick up the slack, if there's any to pick up. Slate figured this out, what, nearly a decade ago. One of the many, many, many, many mistakes CanWest made (hi, Ray Heard!) when they bought Southam was to take National Post columnists off the website. It didn't drive a lot of online subscriptions; it just meant the rest of the country wasn't talking about us.

Matt Yglesias is right; over time, the market value of opinion journalism is trending lower, not higher, because the blogosphere clogs the ether with billions of free opinions. Which helps explain why some of us have travelled great distances to be forced back onto our perhaps atrophied reporting chops. Those chops are likelier to pay the rent, over the long term, than a snappy way with a wisecrack. Although I've got that too, if you want it.