As to your question, I sincerely doubt that online subscriptions will be widely adopted. The New York Times tried this for access to some of its older content, but it failed and they abandoned that initiative a few years ago. The Wall Street Journal has a pay wall for most of its content, but it caters to an audience that is willing to pay for it — for now. ESPN has an interesting model, where almost all of the regular content is free but “Insider” members get special access to above-and-beyond features and analysis. The reality is that news consumers are generally not willing to pay for run-of-the-mill content when they can find comparable content for free elsewhere. Competition being what it is, this drives the price down to zero.

What needs to happen is innovation in ways to monetize around and in addition to content, and not to monetize directly from it. Online advertising is a good start. The hardest part, I think, is that most newspaper companies know the path they have to go down; the question is how specifically they should do it. They're also loaded with debt, with fixed costs related to printing, and with business models and corporate organizations that revolve around printing on dead trees. The Christian Science Monitor is attempting to just straight up “go digital” and see what happens, and we'll see how they fare, but they have the advantage of being a smaller paper. For a company — and historical institution — such as the NYT to follow their lead will require a lot more creative thinking and leadership.

I've been impressed by both, especially by the NYTimes' site. I'd say that their website has kept up with the technology and social changes of how people want their news. It offers very online friendly features for their readers. Maybe a little too much, their “interactive only” news items sometimes annoy me. I read so much quicker and thus gather all the knowledge i think is interesting quicker than their “predetermined speed at which news is transmitted” videos will let me. Interviews and videos clips are nice, but not when you want to speed browse. Photo slideshows excluded, those are great, very easy to absorb any pertinent information!

What I attracts me to the Economist's website are those weekly emails updates that I can sign up for on news topics that interest me. Thus I can browse titles and summaries of articles that may interest me in an email that makes is it oh so easy to stay current ( on what I want to stay current on) through a click of a link. No timewasting browsing via the website.

I'm sure many newspapers have similar features, but these two online news sites definitely prevent me from paying for a printed on paper publication. Do you think we'll have to start paying an online subscription rate any time soon?