This piece prompted me to look at the NYT front page for what seems like the first time in months. I simply don’t use newspaper website front pages to access their content any more. They’re bloated, unusable messes. I simply follow the Twitter feeds of the publications that interest me and get my news from them. (I will admit to check the BBC News front page. It’s the only major news front page I find clean and usable.)

I suspect that many one-time newspaper readers have done the same. The Times is smart in not cutting off those readers – to them, nothing will change with this new pay scheme, and the Times’ traffic and public profile won’t suffer as a result, either.

But what about those folks who cling to the old model of the newspaper front page (in print or online) as the gateway to the day’s news? Well, if those folks are married to the old model for getting news, perhaps they might be enticed to “renew their vows” with the old way of paying for it, too.

That suggests to me the public broadcasting model: Accept that there will be freeloaders, and accomodate them, but try to appeal to your most loyal audience members to pay to help you keep the content flowing.

I suspect that the audience that the Times is trying to convert probably overlaps significantly with the folks who do contribute to NPR and PBS, so this could be smart marketing for the Times.

Could be, but isn’t. If the Times wants to go that way, it should go all-in. Times managers should be more transparent about the costs of producing great journalism and create tiers of contributions from its loyal readers. Why limit yourself to $35 a month from audience members who are likely older and more affluent that the typical American news consumer?

Of course, the Times is a for-profit company, and NPR might be cranking up its pledge drives soon enough, crowding out the competition for pledges from news consumers.

But the Times, like all other news publishers, must continue to cultivate its relationship with its readers. If there are readers out there with the means and inclination to help fund journalism that’s within the publication’s editorial mission and standards, that publication should find ways to enable those readers to help.

The Times needs to cultivate its relationship with its advertisers, too. A paywall scheme that reduces traffic from the readers advertisers want to reach ends up hurting a publication in lost ad revenue far more than it helps in subscription fees.

Don’t forget the advertising angle in this NYT plan, though. When I clicked through from the Times’ homepage today, I got this. (Thank you to Rafat Ali for getting the screengrab.) So is this whole plan simply a ploy – a threat designed to drive readers to click on ads for Lincoln?

Or does it provide yet another example of newspaper publishers refusing to learn a lesson the public’s taught them, over and over and over again?