• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, September 22, 2005

This week, the day after The New York Times started charging readers for online access to its most popular columnists, the newspaper's parent company also announced it would shed 500 employees, or 4 percent of its workforce.

By the end of the day Wednesday, the company's stock was trading at just $29.96 -- a new low for the year.

Of course, the timing is coincidental -- the decision to place columnists behind a paid wall was made months ago. But both show that newspapers, even the Times, continue to make bad business decisions by shortsightedly cutting back on content. After all, slashing the staff will lead to fewer and/or less in-depth stories, while charging makes the remaining content less accessible.

The decision to charge for columnists is especially bizarre, when consumers have shown time and again that they're not willing to pay to read people's opinion on the Web. People will sometimes pay for information, intelligence or even job leads, because they view that as an investment in their own finances; they can turn around and try to use that info to make money themselves.

But opinions? The entire blogosphere is filled with talented, opinionated writers who want nothing more than to express their point of view. For free. For online readers, the problem isn't that there's nothing worth reading online, but that there aren't enough hours in the day to read everything they'd like.

Besides, as of this morning, Web-savvy consumers can still find those vaunted Times Select columnists online for free anyway. The same day that the paper put the columnists behind a paid wall, the blog Never Pay Retail sprang up, with links to free versions of the columns that appear in online papers such as the Albany Times-Union.

Yes, the Times says it's working to close this loophole. But another one surely will appear.

Meanwhile, online newspapers are alienating one of their greatest strengths -- their loyal readers. New research by Nielsen//NetRatings shows that online users in nine of the top 10 markets visit their local newspapers' Web sites more than any other news site.

Papers should be working to further engage those readers, not turn them away with a subscriber-only wall.