The New York Times is considering charging a $5.00 monthly fee for access to its website, according to various media reports. The decision should come sometime in August and could make the Times the first major U.S. newspaper to establish a pay-wall around its online content.

The New York Times Company stock price has taken a beating over the last year, dropping nearly 70%. And besides borrowing $250 million from a Mexican billionaire and trying to sell the Boston Globe, the Times’ debt rating was downgraded to B1, which puts it solidly in junk-bond status and makes it more expensive to borrow money for the cash-strapped newspaper.

As somebody who has advocated charging for online content in the past (here and here), I welcome this development. Of course, we have to wait for the announcement to see if the New York Times will actually make good on something that has been rumored about for the last few months.

While one newspaper’s decision to start charging for online content will not change the current crisis the industry as a whole is in, it could be a step in the right direction. I do think, however, that if the Times makes the transition to a subscription model with  success, other newspapers will quickly follow suit.

Charging for online content is a tricky proposition, and any newspaper that tries it will initially lose a lot of their online traffic. But I think it is time to start looking at the long-term situation instead of the next fiscal year.

The news is free. Newspapers don’t pay anybody to do anything. Things just happen, and reporters write about them. Nobody can claim ownership of a story. So, there is not much value in covering the news, because anybody can do that. The value comes from the quality of the coverage. In a free marketplace the newspaper with the highest quality reporting bringing the most value for its readers will be successful. If people don’t want to pay for that value they will have to settle for lower quality reporting.