Four in the morning

1. Carlotta Gall of the New York Times recounts the day photographer Joao Silva stepped on a land mine. NYT

2. The Financial Times, which is behind a paywall, writes that the Telegraph in London also plans to go behind a paywall, starting next year. Looks like the British are going first. FT

3. The New York Times will now let you set a permalink at the paragraph level. Scripting

4. Columnist and satirist Tina Dupuy is looking to get into a fight with the combative Sarah Palin. TD

Building walls

Despite Jeff Jarvis's incessant pleading, the New York Times plans to start charging for online content. The Times will follow the model of the Financial Times in which readers will get a certain number of stories free and then start getting charged.

Once the New York Times puts up pay walls, many smaller papers will consider doing the same. Given the number of bankruptcies, layoffs, consolidations and death spirals in the industry it's very likely that the smaller papers are ready to experiment sooner than later.

Whether this signals a wholesale shift from free content to pay content will depend more on what entertainment sites do.

Microsoft, News Corp to challenge Google

The Financial Times reports that Microsoft and News Corp, which owns the Wall Street Journal, have joined together to challenge the dominance of Google as an aggregator of online news content.

From the FT:

Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company’s being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.

...the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine.

...the biggest beneficiary of the tussle could be the newspaper industry, which has yet to construct a reliable online business model that adequately replaces declining print and advertising revenues.

The Wall Street Journal has long held the line against giving away all of its online content for free. Meantime, Microsoft's Bing search engine has looked for ways to compete with Google. For its part, Google told FT that newspaper content doesn't account for much online revenue. But how many more people might think "Bing" when they first sign on the Internet in the morning to look for the news (depending, of course, on how many papers follow News Corp's lead)?