janelane asked:

Is journalism so undervalued that no one can be expected to pay for it?

The data suggest that perhaps as many as ~95% of NYT's current readers are not paying for it. WSJ charges $89-99/year; according to Wikipedia they have less than 1M readers worldwide, compared to NYT's 1M daily print subscribers.

If NYT started charging $99/year for the web site, their traffic would likely drop dramatically, perhaps as much as 90%. They are probably better off keeping the site free to readers and selling ads against those pageviews. They ought to be able to make such an assessment with some confidence, given the results of their experiment with Times Select, when they put the top shelf columnists behind a paywall.

I can't put my hands on the numbers at the moment, but not too long ago I read something about how much of The Times' operating budget is dependent upon (i.e., provided by) the advertising in its quarterly special magazines (Escapes! Styles! T!). My recollection is that these few issues, packed with very pricey advertising, pay the bills for the bulk of the paper throughout the year. If they can manage to continue selling 1-2 million copies of the print edition these few days of the year, then they should be able to afford to maintain the news bureau for a daily digital edition.

Business Week published a cover story on The Future Of The New York Times back in 2005. It's worth a look.

RE: End Times - The Atlantic