In Week-old News, I look back at the week’s biggest news involving newspapers, social media and the web.

New York Times to start paywall in 2011:

By far the biggest news of the week was the New York Times announcing that the newspaper would start a metered paywall system in January, 2011.  Here’s the memo to staff via Poynter.

The brass said the Times would use an “approach that will offer users free access to a set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number.”

Here is the Times’ story on its own paywall. It’s ironic that currently the page has an ad promoting a free service from the NYT and Linkedin.

The story contained a link to a Q&A about NYTimes.com, which tried to answer questions readers may have.

Here are the main features of the paywall:

• Readers will be allowed to see an unknown number of articles free each month. A flat fee grants unlimited access for a household.
• Subscribers, even for the Sunday paper only, will receive full access at no additional charge.
• Smartphones are covered under the fee, but e-readers may be charged separately.
• International fees will be the same as the fees U.S. readers pay.
• If someone sends you a link, you will be able to read it and not have it could against your free allotment.

That’s basically it. The Times didn’t say what the fee would be or how many articles would be free.

Industry experts have strong feelings about the plan. Jeff Jarvis blogged here about the paper charging its best customers, risking driving them away. Steve Outing, meanwhile, criticizes the paper here for announcing the paywall now but waiting a year to implement it. Jay Rosen focuses here on the linking issue, which allows readers to get the articles for free. In Rosen’s post, he mentions Felix Salmon’s post about the navigation issue. Steve Yelvington talks here about a point the NYT executives may not even understand.

The New York Times plan will continue to be debated, so read all about it and add to the discussion.

For more about paywalls in general, see my posts  here and here, and my two interviews with online newspaper editors here and here.

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