The Mail‘s original story on the verdict, as seen in the screenshot above, seems to have misread Knox’s guilty of slander verdict as guilty also of murder, which she was not found to be. According to PaidContent’s Staci D. Kramer, who first noticed the slip, the Mail‘s presumably pre-written story nailed the “sank into her chair sobbing uncontrollably” part, but incorrectly imagined ’delighted’ prosecutors as saying ‘justice has been done.’

According the the AtlanticWire, they weren’t the only outlets to get it wrong at first. The Mail‘s British compatriates, the often irreverent tabloid The Sun and the straighter Guardian, also initially reported in err a guilty verdict. This sort of mistake is easy to make and easy to correct, but impossible to erase from the internet, and therefore invites a fair mocking from those who didn’t get it wrong. But really, it could have happened to any of us — maybe we could all slow down.

The new approach, referred to as the metered model, will offer users free access to a set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number. This will enable NYTimes.com to create a second revenue stream and preserve its robust advertising business. It will also provide the necessary flexibility to keep an appropriate ratio between free and paid content and stay connected to a search-driven Web.

Also worth noting is that the Times says will spend the next year creating and building their own “new online infrastructure,” which is good news in the sense that the NYT.com has continually been a leader in what a news organization should look like online. Hopefully they will apply the same ingenuity to whatever pay model they create. That said, the metered system is viewed by many as a way of ‘punishing’ the most loyal readers; people who use the site most have to pay the most, which in most other industries would make perfect sense, but in this one may prove a challenge.

Meanwhile, before everyone gets too riled up, according to Times media reporter Richard Perez-Pena the details are still super foggy:

But executives of The New York Times Company said they could not yet answer fundamental questions about the plan, like how much it would cost or what the limit would be on free reading. They stressed that the amount of free access could change with time, in response to economic conditions and reader demand.

In a memo to staff ‘Arthur and Janet’ [Sulzberger and Robinson] explain why the change now:

We are doing so because we believe that a second revenue stream will be an important part of our future…Fundamentally, this is an important step in our effort to support The New York Times’s high-quality, professional journalism….We also selected the metered model because it offers a number of important virtues from a financial and growth perspective. It allows NYTimes.com to remain a vibrant part of the search-driven Web, which has proven to be an integral reason for why we have become an industry leader in display advertising.

Also, rest assured print subscribers, according to the same memo you will not have to pay an additional fee for online access.

Full press release after the jump. Full memo at Romenesko.

Leaving aside the fact we have been hearing variations on this rumor for close to a year now (the pay wall always imminent, the implementation always a few month away) it’s interesting to see how the news was greeted this time around. Not that long ago a NYT paywall elicited plenty of no way I won’t pay responses, as we progress faster and further into the 2.0 world there appears to be less of that and more resignation on how to best apply to practice so as not to impede on the NYT.com relevance and traffic.

Reuters Felix Salmon:

The NYT system should instead simply measure how much you used the site last month, and then bill you; my guess is that Apple, when it releases its new tablet later this month, will also unveil a system which makes it very easy to link your nytimes.com account to your iTunes account so that your NYT bill will simply get added on to your iTunes bill along with your apps and TV shows and music and ringtones. The NYT itself won’t even need to collect your credit-card information. Once you reach a certain maximum billing level for the year, the NYT and Apple will just stop billing you.

And what of people who can’t or won’t pay? The NYT is an invaluable source of information for many people around the world who don’t have credit cards or iTunes accounts. I think that in the first instance most countries outside the US (and maybe also Canada) should be exempt from having to pay anything.

I take it back. Jeff Jarvis is less than thrilled at the prospect of paying online for what he already pays for in print:

I think the risks are great and grave. The Times could have fought to become the preeminent news brand on earth, fighting it out with the BBC for that title. Instead, I fear, it will duck into its shell as the Washington Post has. I already pay for The Times at home. I hope they would not charge me again. If they do, I will cancel the paper. If they charge me for using the paper more, I will use it less.** I will find other very good substitutes for much of what I get from it — indeed, this will push me to discover and curate new sources.

Meanwhile Gizmodo picks up on Sherman’s note that the timing of this latest rumor interestingly coincides with Apple’s upcoming release of the Tablet.

The New York Times experimented with paid content before, without much success, but that’s not stopping them from giving it a go again. This time, however, the paid-to-free content changeover might coincide with a certain unconfirmed mystery tablet. The NYT announcement is expected to arrive in the “coming weeks,” which puts it smack dab in the middle of Apple’s mystery product press conference, slated for January 27. Convenient!

According to New York magazine, the paid content model could also arrive hand-in-hand with an Apple partnership or distribution deal.

So yeah, maybe what makes it different this time around is that there will soon be available technology which makes it possible to pay without pissing too many reader off. Or not. We’ve been talkin NYT paid content for close to a year now…let’s just say I’ll believe it when they start asking for my credit card number.

Pic via.

“Having lived through the Awful Aughts — which began with news organizations vowing to get serious after 9/11 and ended with Jon and Kate, Octomom and Balloon Boy — do you feel better served by the news establishment? The easy answer, of course, is YOU MUST BE KIDDING.”

– Howie Kurtz looks back on a decade in media in today’s Washington Post.

If the media were a politician who had to answer the question every incumbent party dreads “are you better off now than you were eight years ago?” they would be in for a sweeping defeat. And in fact, the media, or the media as we knew it at the beginning of this decade has suffered a sweeping defeat — will we even have newspapers in ten years? Doubtful.

Of course, as in politics, there is the argument to be made that you get the media (or the politician) you deserve, so should we be doing better? Perhaps in the form of an online payment? We may not have a choice. The Times is reporting that as soon as the next few weeks some news organizations will be taking “the plunge.” Meaning among other things that the era of free content may be a thing of the Aughts.

Hot topic this year is paid content. I seem to recall it being a hot topic last year, along with plummeting stock prices, however in the interim the paper has been making some fairly serious noises about what their paid content model might look like and hinting that it is not far off. But not imminent either!

The Observer caught up with managing editor Bill Keller, who is clearly a man hoping that if he puts off the unsavory paid content decision for just a leetle while longer there is a small chance some other solution will suddenly present itself and save the day!

“In the end, I think it will come down to a gut call about what we think the audience will accept and how we think the market will evolve…There’s no clear evidence that a pay model will save newspapers from the flight of advertisers, it might, but that’s a matter of faith; nothing in previous experience (including the experience of the Journal and FT) and nothing in the reams of spread sheets proves that it will.”

All true. But it also sounds like the initial panic that followed the great newspaper collapse of the last 12 months has subsided and now become the norm. Perhaps the new theory is, better the bad system you know than the bad system you don’t know! Either way Keller speculates now that a decision will be reached by the end of the year “if only so we can stop going to pay-model meetings.” But really, what’s the rush.

For a long time, the competition between The Hollywood Reporter and Variety was symbiotic — two stalwarts of showbiz with healthy bottom lines played off one another like other classic America brands: Crest or Colgate? Coke or Pepsi? Oreos or Hydrox?  Then the digital revolution brought new infotainment habits, and when combined with a once-in-a-lifetime ad recession, the trades conservative (backwards?) approach to Internet publishing went from safe to deadly.

Finke reports that Variety will be redefining its paid wall, which means “the website will no longer be free. So online and print content will both be subscriber-based.” She also reports that, according to her sources, The Hollywood Reporter is “about to dump its print version.”

To Finke’s credit, her reporting is decidedly schaudenfreude-free:

In my opinion, this is a necessary step if the financially beleaguered trades are going to survive the current economic downturn. Even if advertising does pick up for other media outlets. Because the contraction in the entertainment industry, and the change to a no-frills attitude regarding lavish awards advertising, has permanently hurt the trades which in turn have tried to staunch the bleeding by massive layoffs. (On a personal note, no matter how hard I compete with Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, I’d hate to see either trade disappear from the showbiz landscape. Too many people work there, and too many people need the niche content.) That said, I’ve known that Variety spent 6 months intensely studying all its options.

In response to this report, Nielsen Business Media, the parent company of The Hollywood Reporter said to Folio that it will not shut down the print edition of The Hollywood Reporter, though “they continue to explore all options.”

If and when they decide to pursue a new option, we’ll probably read it first on Nikki Finke’s deadline.com!

Separately, Mr. Murdoch said The Wall Street Journal, owned by News Corp., will start charging users for accessing the paper on mobile devices such as Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry smart phones and Apple Inc.’s iPhone. He said newspaper subscribers would pay $1 a week for mobile access, while others would pay $2 a week.

He also said the company is mulling plans to charge online subscriptions for Hulu, the video Web site that News Corp. launched with big media partners including NBC Universal. NBC Universal is 80% owned by General Electric Co. and 20% by Vivendi SA.

Typically a throw away comment like this merits very little attention. However, if the comment comes from arguably the most influential man in all of global media (and the number-one ranked Media Mogul in our Power Grid), people stand up and take notice.

As pointed out by new media guru Steve Outing, “this is exactly the model that many newspaper and magazine publishers have been talking about lately, though many are having trouble figuring out what they’ve got that they can charge for.”

O’Reilly’s cracked the code on this: premium members get benefits that include:

• Bill’s exclusive critique of the night’s show, recorded by him immediately after the show ends.
• Exclusive video clips.
• Access to audio archives of The Radio Factor show.
• Weekly backstage live chat with Bill exclusively for Premium members to ask him questions.
• Access to exclusive photo albums of Bill with celebrities and doing his thing.
• Priority e-mail. Your message to Bill will not get tossed in with all the other e-mail he gets, and
• Premium members are promised “priority treatment and a guaranteed review.”

In all there are 16 benefits to being an O’Reilly Premium Member. So how can this apply to the Newspaper business? Outing explains thusly:

Actually, as the news industry ponders news membership models, creating Premium memberships that get you more from a favorite star journalist and access to the person could be worth paying for. As I reported here a few days ago, Men’s Health magazine turned its Jimmy the Bartender advice feature into a paid iPhone app; that’s sort of a premium membership, albeit a cheap one at $2.99 to buy the app and no recurring fees. Other magazines may be able to turn their star columnists into Premium memberships.

Even for newspapers I think this has potential. Consider a paid Premium membership for New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman for, say, $20 a year; or a Financial Times niche columnist Premium membership for $100 or more a year. Friedman might offer extra content like full video or audio interviews of the world leaders he interviews, and exclusive webcasts or live chats restricted to paying Premium members. The FT columnist, because of his focus on an arcane slice of the business world, can offer Premum members additional inside-baseball information and stats that business people will pay for. Ergo, a financial niche columnist might be worth more with the Premium Membership model than a rock-star columnist like Friedman, who covers more generic news topics.

This could even filter down to the local level. Could a newspaper reporter who covers city council and city politics have a Premium Membership that offered paying members extra insider info and reporting, in the way that inside-politics newsletter editors of decades past charged political junkies and people affected by local politics for their in-depth knowledge and digging?

The biggest distinction/advantage that O’Reilly has is his well developed cult of personality. Its the advantage of being one of the forefathers to the wildly successful sub-genre of “opinion journalism”. So while traditional newspapers don’t have a built-in audience designed by shared taste and mindset, they do have a built-in audience defined by region.

Writing for Editor & Publisher Joe Strupp reports:

“The site will offer in-depth coverage of University of Alabama athletics, including specialized blogs, forums, user profiles and video,” an announcement stated.

Added Chris Rattey, the News’ director of new media: “TideSportsExtra provides University of Alabama fans with content they cannot get anywhere else. With photos, blogs, video and extensive coverage, the site will offer an unparalleled fan experience.”

Among the paid-only items on the site will be columnist Cecil Hurt’s new blog, along with his columns and Internet talk show. “In addition to experiencing richer content, Web site users will be able to engage and participate more easily with comments, photos and videos, creating a deeper online community,” the announcement added.