If there's a chance they could successfully pull off a system where visitors pay a few cents for a quality article, why wouldn't it make sense for them to do it?
Their business model is under threat from 'free' stuff and so their response is to do what worked in the past, close the gates and set up a toll booth. Only this time it won't work, there are 100's of little side roads now, and you no longer have to use the 'main' road to get the news you are looking for.
People used to be 'loyal' to their newspapers, that's why the payments rolled in. That loyalty is very low, as long as the writing is good I really don't care whether I'm reading my stuff in German, French, English or Dutch and from what newspaper or other outlet it comes. So many choices, it's a delight. The AP feed relaying to fill the newspapers was a clever idea to save some money at the time but in the long term it backfired, it meant that there was less reporting in general, not that the reporters that were freed up were used to go digging.
It's only a matter of time before google or some other large party will hire a bunch of reporters directly and gets them to make the missing element (quality editorial content) and with the trouble at the regular newspapers I'm thinking that it will be a buyers market when they do.
As for the Google Times option, I think it'll bring about more problems than solutions. You don't build a quality newspaper by "hiring a bunch of reporters". There's a lot of accumulated knowledge in places like the NYT or WSJ. What we see from the web - from leading "reporters" investing in the field they're supposedly covering to opinion pieces by Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey - is far from encouraging.
IMO, this sort of thing is ultimately inevitable, and I don't think that the Internet is the ultimate cause (it's an accelerant, at best) -- I think that it's been getting harder for newspapers to compete with the depth of coverage provided "for free"* by television news organizations.
* When's the last time you paid a bill to CNBC or CNN? I don't pay an explicit bill for CBC Newsworld -- it's included in my cable package.
The cable model is interesting. Perhaps such sites could work out deals with ISPs - you'd pay a few more bucks each month and in return get free account on WSJ, NYT etc.
AFAIK that is an excellent way to get into trouble with the law, and if it isn't then it should be.
You are supposed to come up with your price independently and without 'backtalk' in the boardroom.
If two gas stations get caught doing this they'll end up in serious trouble, I don't see why it should be any different when you're running newspapers.
Check out the article - it's the same guy who created The Wire, he's not a bad writer :)
It's clever though, that's for sure. But like most typical layman attempts at 'hacking' the court system it would probably fail. Judges are not nearly as stupid as people seem to take for granted.
Having worked at a few large companies, it's more likely that some executive got scared, hired a few toadies to tell him what he wanted to hear, then put in place a "plan" that he'd already decided and that is doomed to failure.
That's the way it works most places.