The first time I used the internet was in my mother’s office when I was in high school, probably sometime around 1997.  I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to do with it, so I just printed out pages of statistics for my favorite basketball players.  With no home computer, I had no need for even an email address until I went off to college, at which point I took advantage of the sudden, unfettered worldwide web access by spending hundreds of hours reading online rumors regarding professional wrestling.  In the years since, my web usage has become somewhat more…sophisticated.

While I was, perhaps, a little behind the times, the fact is that no one was quite sure what to make of the internet in the late nineties, and, in a blind attempt to get ahead, many major institutions set themselves on an unsustainable path by making freely available their content that had previously been available only via subscription or newstand.  It is just now, nearly a decade and a half later, that a potentially viable attempt to correct this is being implemented by a major newspaper.

I am a strong proponent of the outside-the-established-institutions journalism that has come about during the internet era, from Drudge to HuffPo to Deadspin, but I still believe that the resources offered by major traditional media are critical to the information age.  We cannot let our newspapers die.  Though there may not be any shortage of political coverage, no institution covers American politics like the Washington Post, and in an increasingly global community, few institutions possess the international reach of the New York Times.

Despite the ubiquitousness of the web, online advertising has yet to translate into the revenue-generating power of a print ad or a television spot.  So with online content available for free and ad revenue down, how do these institutions remain in business? 

This past month, the Times finally (again) instituted an online pay wall.  They are not the first major newspaper to do so; the Wall Street Journal has had one for as long as I can remember, though they haven’t seemed to quite gain the online traction of other free publications.  If this is successful, I imagine that others will follow suit.  Personally, I have shifted to Twitter as my primary means of reading the news.  By creating a roster of writers and news outlets that I trust and respect and “follow”, Twitter has become my one-stop news-shopping site.  However, I feel ethically obligated to financially support the Times by becoming a digital subscriber to ensure that a trusted organization with the best means to provide global coverage and firsthand reporting continues to do so.

If you take advantage of nytimes.com and have the means to do so, I strongly encourage you to support this risky and radical paradigm shift with your credit card.  Even if it means that other sites that currently offer free content go behind the “wall”, in the long run, I believe that we all will benefit from saving the great American newspapers from dying.