In the past, The Onion has pretended to be sold off to a Chinese company, completely redesigning the website to start discussing fish. Just a few weeks ago, they pretended to start a celebrity-filled campaign to get a Pulitzer only to “reveal” that the whole thing was a “scam.” With a paper so thrilled to joke about its own reality, it’s unsurprising that many readers have been waiting for the punchline ever since it was announced that The Onion was beginning to experiment with a paywall. However, it doesn’t seem like this is a joke.

em>The New York Times today announced the launch of its “digital subscriptions” – known more commonly as a paywall – in Canada. On the 28th of this month, NYT readers in the U.S. will be offered digital subscriptions as well.

What does this mean for readers?

On Wednesday, New York Times chairman and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. dealt Luddites a blow by admitting that eventually, the Gray Lady will exist only virtually.

Turns out we’re not as addicted to narcissistic social media sites as we like to think, at least not where money’s concerned. Social media researchers from the University of Southern California are reporting that no one, as in exactly 0% of the people surveyed, would be willing to pay for previously free web apps like Twitter.

As journalism’s existentialist crisis continues, Time magazine has resorted to what many readers dread: an online paywall. Take a look around Time‘s website and you’ll find that print magazine content is no longer freely available. So how can you read it? Buy the print magazine…or the iPad edition.

The age of free online newspaper content has been coming to its end for a while now and news from across the pond today brings its demise one step closer. The BBC is reporting (and doing so free of charge, we might add) that News International, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp is going to begin charging users for access to the London Times and the Sunday Times.

ohn Nichols and Robert McChesney, this was a book promotional event and an opportunity to outline their recommendations to save traditional journalism. It was a setup for a predictable night full of previews of what’s contained inside yet another “save journalism” solution book. Yet, thankfully, David Carr took a topic that has been spoken about to death and breathed new life into the discussion.

The question, koan-like in its infinitude and all-meaningfulness, of whether Rupert Murdoch‘s self-importance outstrips his actual importance at last seems capable of an answer. Today, one of Murdoch’s papers, The Australian, carries a story on a briefing Murdoch gave to announce the unexpectedly rosy results his media conglomerate Newscorps, enjoyed last quarter. The answer appears to be yes.

Rupert Murdoch dropped the hint that he was thinking about pulling The Wall Street Journal’s content from Google earlier this week, decrying them and other aggregators as “parasites.” Conveniently overlooked: plenty of News Corporation sites pull content from other sites, some extensively.