The New York Times has said it will begin charging for access to content on its website in January as this side of the Atlantic The Times gears up to put its paywall up next week hot on the heels of axing as many as 50 jobs.

According to reports, Bill Keller, the paper’s executive editor of the newspaper said at a dinner for the Foreign Press Association Thursday evening that January is when it will flip the paywall switch.

This as the Huffington Post is on track to top the New York Times in web traffic this year. I’m guessing that when it goes paid HuffPo is going to race ahead and rivals will catch up.

Also yesterday the New York Times Company’s senior vice president of digital operations, Martin Nisenholtz, said at the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in Boston that the homepage of the paper would remain free, but like Keller gave no details on how much the metered model will cost readers.

The Times has its plans pretty finalised, we’ve all been signing up for a look-see at the new website pay wall website, which it has been inviting readers to register in order to get a preview as it turns on the paywall next week.

News International is promising a host of new features when the new site and paywall goes live on The Times and Sunday Times websites.

This is to include Daily live Q&A – quiz your journalists; exclusive photo galleries and video; as well as its roster of columnists including Matthew Parris to Caitlin Moran and Mike Atherton.

The paywall will go up hot on the heels of News International budgets at both papers. The Times is slashing 10% and around 50 staff while The Sunday Times is also cutting by 10%. A move Peter Preston in The Observer said sent a mesasage of “pain, not gain. And it’s almost precisely not what Rupert Murdoch in his pomp would have prescribed”.

However, former Times media correspondent, Dan Sabbagh, wrote recently on his blog, that he believes that News International could well succeed as it doesn’t need many subscribers to sign up to make it work.

By his calculations assuming almost everybody pays £2 a week or £104 a year (with few opting for the more expensive £1 a day option) it needs just 200,000 subscribers to make it work.

“Assume that both titles do about £25 million of digital ad revenue (a conservative 6.5 per cent of overall turnover). A lot of that cash disappears when The Times goes pay (readers could drop by 90 per cent), but not all of it. Say you lose £20 million, and keep £5 million. But you could raise £20 million a year gross to make up the difference if you sign up a bit over 192,000 people.

“Round that up to 200,000 online only subscriptions, and that’s your definition of success I reckon.  But you have to hope that those 200,000 are not the loyal everyday buyers of the printed newspaper who are not taking advantage of a really good deal.”

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