Frankly, if all the news organizations locked pinkies, and said we’re all going to put up a big fat pay wall, you know what, more traffic for us. News is a commodity; I’m sorry to say.

—Vivian Schiller, former SVP & GM of NYTimes.com, current CEO of NPR: Newsweek, July 2009. On the recent news regarding the NYT metered reading model, she recently observed to BusinessInsider:  “The whole industry will be watching to see how that works and whether they should follow suit…except NPR. Our very successful pay model (300mm+ a year across NPR and NPR member stations) is voluntarily and will remain thus.”

But the Times did get people to pay, right? [Newsweek]
We far exceeded our expectation—225,000 subscribers paid $50 a year, in addition to the home delivery subscribers, who got all of the Web for free. But guess what, that’s $10 million. Instead of 225,000 who pay the $50, let’s say it’s one million subscribers. OK. That’s $50 million a year. That’s not going to save any newspaper. It’s going to kill your advertising base. The numbers don’t work.