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Jeff Jarvis, the popular media blogger, has long ridiculed newspapers for trying to find innovative ways to charge for the stories they publish online. True to form, he had a kneejerk reaction to the New York Times’s plan to require frequent readers of its digital content to buy a subscription. Jarvis argues that in seeking to charge its “best customers,” the Times is guilty of “cockeyed economics”: So why charge your best customers? Why single them out? Why risk driving them away? The logic eludes me. So do the economics. But it’s Jarvis, not the Times, whose economics, and logic,…

In a mildly anticlimactic announcement, the New York Times let it be known today that in, oh, a year or so it will get around to figuring out exactly how it will charge some people for its stories. If discretion is the better part of valor, the Gray Lady is Rambo. This much we know: The Times will refer to its as-yet-undefined online subscription service not as a “paywall” (which it is) but as a “metered model” (which it isn’t). “Paywall,” apparently, carries the wrong sort of connotations; it sounds like the type of thing Ronald Reagan would have demanded…

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