OPINION matters in America. Cable TV stations are founded on it, radio stations live for it. In newspaper opinion, nobody rivals The New York Times. Among the chattering classes the paper’s commentators provide the grist for the daily public debate — Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, Frank Rich are names to love or loathe.

But from September their opinions will reach a smaller audience. The paper announced last week that from this autumn, NYT.com, its website, will charge $49.95 (£27) for access to its commentators and a sneak peek at upcoming newspaper features.

At any other paper, the move would have probably gone largely unnoticed, but The New York Times is America’s most influential periodical and the world’s biggest newspaper on the web. Where it goes, others follow. The move sparked headlines in the traditional media and a riot among bloggers who often link to the paper’s columnists.

The rest of the site will remain free, for now. But this foray into paid-for content is already causing ripples.

The debate over whether newspapers should charge for their content has swung back and forth since The Wall Street Journal launched wsj.com, its subscription-only service, in 1995. NYTimes.com was launched in 1996 and briefly charged overseas readers before deciding to stick to online advertising as its main source of income.

According to The New York Times, in April its website had 1.7m visitors daily; its newspaper circulation in March was 1.1m. Although advertising on websites accounts for only 2%-3% of most newspapers’ revenues, it is the fastest-growing source of income. Many are loath to charge for content, fearing readers will defect to free sites, taking advertisers with them.

The New York Times’s u-turn comes at a time when free access to newspaper subscription has emerged as the favoured business model. The Los Angeles Times recently stopped charging for its entertainment section and the subscription model’s biggest stalwart, The Wall Street Journal’s parent, Dow Jones, bought CBSMarketwatch, a free financial news site.

There are some obvious advantages to being free. In Britain, the Times and Sunday Times’s website, timesonline,co.uk, has boosted its visitors in the past year from 1.7m to 4.7m per month. Last October it dropped charges for overseas readers and many of those new readers are from outside Britain. However, when FT.com, the Financial Times’s website, introduced subscriptions in 2002, the number of users also rose, but not by much — from 3.2m a month to 3.9m.

Online advertising pays for that “free” content and newspapers can charge more if they have a larger audience. But advertising is cyclical and the question is how to make money from online audiences in a downturn as well as in the good times.

At his recent annual shareholders’ meeting, Warren Buffett, the world’s second-richest man and a Washington Post director, said: “The other guy is only one click away. What’s going to make you pay for the Washington Post when you can get The New York Times free?” Comment is one area where The New York Times, Financial Times and Wall Street Journal are betting they can add enough value. A spokeswoman for The New York Times said the paper was looking for extra revenues from subscriptions that would help smooth out future fluctuations. “Online advertising for us is growing at over 30% a year. But at some point the rate of growth will decline,” she said.

Author and journalist Mike Wolff commented: “You go to the New York Times website because of its NYT-branded news and because it’s free. Is anybody really that interested in the Times’s opinion people? Frankly they’re sort of boring.”

Boring or not, a lot of people are very interested in whether people will pay to read them.

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