The covers have come off the long-awaited announcement from News International on its plans to charge for access to The Times and Sunday Times. Users will pay £1 for a day’s access and £2 for a week’s subscription. It’s a bold and arguably very risky move. Supporters of the idea will say that payment mechanisms already work for the FT and Wall Street Journal but the audience and content is different. Business high flyers users will pay for exclusive content that they can’t get anywhere else and helps them do their jobs. The Times falls into a much more competitive category where ‘free’ (which really got going with the birth of Metro) has become the norm and a generation has grown up not paying anything for media content – be it news, entertainment or music.

‘Free’ only works where ad revenues provide adequate return, or a compulsory tax is put on users (as Rupert himself might have said re the BBC). And it’s a shame for all of us that the ad numbers haven’t quite stacked up yet (with news media at least).

The advertisers will be crucial to this, as a drop off in page views will likely mean they’ll move on to other outlets, making the need to attract paying subscribers even more pressing. Either way, this will truly be fascinating and its success or failure will probably define the media landscape for the next 20 years. If (arguably) the most successful media figure the world has ever seen can’t make this work then arguably no-one else will be able to.