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Javits Convention Center – for which tickets cost $15. There’s the New York Times Travel Show – Feb. The Times is already half way there in producing added value beyond the daily report – and for which it rightly charges (and finds willing buyers).

I spelled out some content specifics for what I called TimesPlus in an OJR article last December. Why doesn’t the Times mobilize its redoubtable 1,300-person-strong newsroom to start producing added-value online content for which, I’ll bet, a good fraction of users would pay a monthly fee? A lot of the content would help out-of-town visitors make their trips to NYC and other cities more interesting and even memorable.

But there’s another way for the Times to exploit the potential of its website to raise needed revenue that advertising by itself can’t bring. Times Select was a bust, as was Brill’s Content. Brill, who unsuccessfully tried to sell paid content with his Brill’s Content during the dot.com boom/bust, acknowledges in his memo “all of this may seem unrealistic,” but nonetheless concludes, “There is no alternative.”

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Search engines and aggregation sites would continue to get free access to the headline and first paragraph of each story – to help keep relevant as an information source on the Internet. Under Brill’s elaborate pricing scheme – you have to read his whole, alternately maddening and inspired memo – visitors would pay $55 a year to get access to all content. But most of the millions of users decided they wouldn’t pay for content they’d been getting for free.Ī confidential memo from multimedia publishing pioneer Steve Brill obtained by Romenesko argues that the Times should “ the Web’s lethal dynamics” and start charging for online content. It threw in as a sweetener the paper’s archives going back to the 19th century. Times Select required users to start paying for the paper’s columnists and some other stories.

Executive Editor Bill Keller’s recent ruminations on the touchy subject of paid content have led to speculation that the dearly departed Times Select will be reincarnated in some more palatable form. The New York Times should indeed use its website to generate more revenue – but not by charging for any part of its presently all-free daily report.