UPDATE: It has been confirmed that the NY Times will start charging access to their site in 2011.
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New York Times is debating whether or not to charge a fee to accessing the nytimes.com portal. Right now, it's leaning towards a yes. And if you think about it, it makes sense. People need to buy a newspaper to read the articles in a newspaper, but if you go onto nytimes.com you can get all those articles for free? Seems like NYTimes.com is afraid of the world catching on to that glitch, and everybody stops buying newspapers and heading over to the website.

So the plan may be that you can read a certain amount of articles for free on the site, but then would be required to subscribe to a fee to view the rest of the articles.

The problem is, will they lose online traffic if they decide to go with the pricing scheme? The answer: Probably. But what they lose in traffic might be made up in the few that decide to pay to read online news.