News International is set to introduce a pay wall for The Times and The Sunday Times online news content, in an effort to secure the future of the ailing paper and the newspaper industry as a whole.

Online news providers such as The Telegraph, The Guardian and the BBC offer free news content to online readers. However, in recent years, the print industry has suffered as more people turn to digesting online content, rather than going out and buying a newspaper.

To combat this decline, the Rupert Murdoch owned News International will charge readers of The Times site £2 for a week’s access or £1 for daily access from June onwards.

Such news has been met with mixed opinion, with many industry commentators such as TechWatch reporting that the charge is a little ”rich for our blood.”

The risky strategy is reported in Marketing Week to be a long-term decision, with managing director of customer direct, Katie Vanneck, cited as saying ”Changing customer behaviour is not something that will happen overnight, but we will have fewer but more valuable customer relationships. We will know where those customers are and have a direct billing relationship with them.”

News International’s sister company BSkyB has previously implemented a subscription strategy, but this offers exclusive film and sports content, so it remains to be seen what exclusivities The Times can offer.

The Guardian’s digital content blog comments that newspapers must be flexible to ensure their survival in an ever changing industry and comments that the pay wall has been widely criticised as ”it contradicts the experience of news publishers to date in trying to charge for their core, general news product.” 

Nevertheless, former Guardian’s marketing director, Mark Sands, was cited in Marketing Week as saying ”the commercial future of newspapers will one day require that content is paid for in some way – free is never sustainable.”

It seems the newspaper industry remains somewhat divided, but whatever the result of News International’s pay wall, it is clear that there needs to be some form of restructuring for the news content generation industry if it is to survive. If the long term result of paid content is that of success, be sure to expect more newspapers to jump on the bandwagon.