In a small item that ran in today’s Times, the paper announced that it has instituted a paywall for The Telegram & Gazette, a Worcester, Mass.-based paper owned by the Times Company, which seems to serve as a model for Times‘ own paywall, to be launched in January.
The Telegram‘s metered systen will allow users without a subscription to read just 10 local articles per month, a risky model given how terribly paywalls worked out for Newsday. The article says The Times has no idea about how its own metered paywall will be implemented, but it’s hard to imagine they won’t take anything away from this experiment in charging readers for articles.
It appears that this, along with eyeball-tracking, can be seen as The Times doing its homework before it plunges into the murky business of putting a genie back in the bottle.
