Years ago we were all happy to see the New York Times drop its paywall and join the century. Now that paywall is going back up. I’ll certainly be linking to fewer and fewer NYT articles if a full paywall model is adopted. There are plenty of places on the web to get the same news. I like going there because the content is reliable and literate. But if it’s not free, buh-bye. I guess ad revenue hasn’t worked out for them and they’ve either not investigated or ruled out other revenue generation models. Sad, but we’ll find another paper of record for the internet. Maybe the Guardian or the BBC? Moby has some excellent extended coverage of the issue.

What wasn’t mentioned in the article or in the press release is that the Times Company is struggling, with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and an increasingly complicated cast of creditors, including Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim (which loaned the company $250 million, at 14 percent interest) as well as a $225 million sale-leaseback arrangement involving its corporate headquarters. And, as Michael Wolff has pointed out, these odd deals, and the general economic woes of the company, can be blamed squarely on Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., who is the same exec responsible for leading the pay-wall changes. Sulzberger has presided over a ten-year-long catastrophe at the Times that has come close to destroying the company. Most dramatically, Sulzberger spent some $2 billion dollars buying back stock (for which he paid more than $50 a share, nearly four times what it’s worth today). But he also ended the company’s previous experiment in charging for online access, Times Select, just before the advertising economy started to sink.

Opinion about the coming pay-wall is divided. Many industry analysts doubt the ability of the Times to charge for content and maintain their audience. Some readers have stepped forward saying they are happy to pay for content—because they value what the Times does. Others, like Wolff, have mocked the paper, saying that aggregators like his own Newser have the most to gain from the move since they can, after paying the Times‘ small subscription fee, simply summarize its expensive work and re-sell it…thus making advertising income without having the costs of staffing bureaus and copy desks.

But who’s to say that the Times plans on convincing all of its readers to pay? What’s much more likely is that the company will aim to persuade a small potion of its current audience, say 10 to 20 percent, to subscribe. This would put the site well into the norm of so-called “freemium” business models wherein 10 to 20 percent of customers pay for premium content and, in so doing, support a variety of other services.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.