Can papers make free news on the net pay?

It is the digital revolution that has wrought the most profound change, of both culture and commerce, and it has been difficult for traditional print journalists and proprietors to accept. Journalists do not like to think that the fruit of their labours is being "given away".

Press owners have found the transition even more difficult to bear. The very idea of allowing the public free access to editorial content was anathema to people whose very business model depended on turning a profit from the sale of their products.

That's why several of them initially decided to charge subscription fees. These "pay walls" might have seemed sensible five years ago. Now, with global competition among hundreds of news outlets, the paid access model has grown less tenable.

Traffic is what counts. Better to attract as many eyeballs as possible and raise revenue through advertising than to eke out income from increasingly reluctant readers.

Now The New York Times, after pressure from both the public and several of its own columnists, has finally decided to dismantle the pay wall that kept so much of its best writing, including its archives, away from the gaze of those who were not prepared to fork out.

This, incidentally, ends one of the greatest ironies of modern times. It will allow fans of Thomas Friedman, one of the world's most forthright advocates of internet-driven globalisation in his book The World is Flat, to read his NY Times columns at long last.

Shrewdly, the NY Times has managed to obtain a sponsor, American Express, to support its premium content pages, another way to attract revenue.

But it is the timing that is fascinating because of developments at another of New York's major newspapers, The Wall Street Journal.

It lays claim to 983,000 online subscribers, each paying $99 (£50) a year for access to all its material. Yet it is predicted that one of the first acts of the journal's new owner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, will be a demolition of the pay wall.

It is difficult to divine a specific figure for the WSJ's online take because some fees cover the newsprint version, but it works out, very roughly, at more than £40 million a year. That's a heck of a lot of money to forgo so Murdoch's managers must feel that there are greater commercial advantages down the line by opening the site to all.

If Murdoch does as forecast it will certainly put pressure on the Financial Times to reconsider the viability of maintaining its own pay wall. It currently has 100,000 global subscribers, most of whom pay an Northern Rockers annual fee of £98.99, with a few paying £200 (for research and monitoring tools). Again, "bundling" with the print version confuses total digital revenue. Taken at face value though, FT.com stands to lose roughly £9 million in a full year if it ceases to charge.

There are some FT executives who argue that it can continue to do so because its upscale niche market can afford it, but when I interviewed the paper's editor, Lionel Barber, earlier this year, it was clear that the wall may crumble. "We're looking at the business model," he said cautiously. "We realise that our material has value, and that we want to make money from it. But how the model breaks down is still being decided." While the FT considers what to do, most of Britain's national and regional papers have already come to terms with the need to offer free content. The Independent was one of the last to pull down its wall after realising that it was failing to lure enough readers to its site. Now it even offers a free news mail service, though most papers have been doing that for years.

Some papers still demand that people pay for archive material, but that is pointless because it generates little revenue and has the disadvantage of encouraging academic researchers to seek material from other sources, thereby denying the paper the subsequent brand recognition.

The inevitability is that some news outlets will die in this race to attract readers. The survivors will be those boasting either the greatest quantity of traffic or a high-quality readership.

In other words, the new media battle is just the same as the one fought by good old inky newspapers..