Murdoch to charge for Times

From June, anyone wanting to read The Times or The Sunday Times online will have to pay £1 a day or £2 a week for the privilege. Those who subscribe to the printed edition will be able to access the paper’s planned thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk websites as part of their subscription.

Analysts warned that The Times risks losing “almost all” of its online readers when it erects the so-called “pay walls”.

Rebekah Brooks, a former editor of The Sun and chief executive of News International, the British subsidiary of Mr Murdoch’s News Corp, said the move was a “crucial step towards making the business of news an economically exciting proposition”.

 She said The Sun and The News of the World, News International’s two other British newspapers, will also introduce charging for online access.

Mr Murdoch, who has accused Google of “stealing” his newspapers’ stories and revenue, plans to introduce online charges for all of his newspapers.

James Harding, editor of The Times, agreed that the paper is “going to lose a lot of passing traffic”, but said charging is “less of a risk than just throwing away our journalism and giving it away for free”.

Claire Enders, head of Enders Analysis, said Mr Murdoch is living in “dreamland” if he believes many Times readers will pay for access. “They may get 100,000 regular readers to sign up, but it’s not going to be millions, and it’s going to take years,” she said.

Times Online, the newspapers’ current website, had 20.4m unique visitors in February. Ms Enders estimated that the website collects about £15m to £18m a year from online advertising, which would drop massively when the content disappears behind the pay wall.

“This is not even going to budge the needle. The Times lost £88m last year and has lost money on and off for the last 30 years,” she added. “This is not about making money, it’s about safeguarding the existing customer base.”

The Times and The Sunday Times are the first mass-market UK newspapers to introduce pay walls. Until now only specialist sites such as the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal have introduced charging, but allow access to some content for free.

The new Times websites will go live in May, with trial access free of charge until June.