Flutterby™! : NY Times to charge for content?

The article says:

New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. appears close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations.

The Metafilter thread has the usual satisfying feeling snark (from user allen.spaulding):

I'll only pay for stories when the reporter maintains in appropriate relationships with the article's subjects and then falsifies information with the express intent of lying to the public and goading us into war. I can get all of my light entertainment elsewhere for free from other sources, including my plagiarism (although The Times has always done such a nice job with that one). But you really can't beat The Times for gross violations of journalistic integrity married with war-mongering. It's worth every penny.

But also some helpful iunsight(from user Cool Papa Bell):

This is an interesting, related article, with the thesis that the only text content on the Web that can be sold effectively is stuff that is "wildly unique and immensely useful." The NY Times is not sufficiently unique to charge for content. Consumer Reports, on the other hand, has a well established reputation of unimpeachable product reviews.

and telling questions, like this from theora55:

Google has figured out how to make money with micro-ads. No annoying floatie ads (hello nytimes.com), no blinking ads, no ads pretending to be content (hello msn). Craigslist is killing newspapers giving away classifieds, with a plain vanilla screen(thanks, craig). Why have the big content producers sucked so hard at selling content-related micro-ads?