Chucking a prepared speech at the Syndicate conference in New York yesterday, Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations at the New York Times Company, instead revealed some of the Times' still-in-development plans to support the site's new financial model. These include an affiliate program and the redesign or restructuring of site and content elements, such as RSS feeds, to better exploit what Nisenholtz called the "trend to unbundle from the container."

The Times already has RSS so I'm not sure what he's talking about exactly. But "unbundling from the container" dilutes whatever uniqueness the Times has to offer it seems to me.

In general, these moves may backfire in the long term. There was a decidedly mixed reaction to the TimesSelect news and a good deal of strong criticism in the “blogosphere.” That prompted the Times to clarify that it wasn’t intending to put more content behind the firewall.

I understand the need to diversify revenues, but now may not be the time to introduce a paid content strategy when newspaper growth is only happening online.

So it's kind of a prisoner's dilemma for newspapers. If all of them charged, and that was the norm, it would work as a model and people would accept it. But as long as there's so much free content, and given the legacy of free content, it's hard to introduce a paid strategy and succeed unless you've got a unique brand or unique assets.