Last night, media mogul Steven Brill sent us—unsolicited—his thoughts on the possibility of the New York Times charging for its website, which we wrote about yesterday. We will reproduce his thoughts in full, because how often do you get free, unsolicited musings from a media mogul on the area of his expertise (his new gig, Journalism Online, is all about this), even after you have derided him as usually wrong? Brill writes:

1. We have found in creating models like this for our newspaper and magazine affiliates that one of the other key advantages for them is that charging for online will actually enhance their PRINT revenues and circulation. There are two reasons: First, it allows the paper to "bundle" a discount offer for both, so that a would-be print subscriber or renewer can be offered a discount on his online subscription if he or she takes the print edition. (As in "Save 50% off the online subscription if you renew your print subscription.") You can't do that if you're not putting any value on, and not charging for, the online version. Second, if you keep giving one version (online) away for free, then you increasingly undercut sales of the other (print) version, not to mention your ability to raise the price on the newsstand, something most newspapers and magazines are trying to do. The long and short of it is that where papers have charged online in Europe and the U.S. they have enhanced their PRINT revenues. Indeed, the list of newspapers in the U.S. that have not suffered losses in print circulation lately looks like a list of those that are charging for their online versions.

2. In the models we are developing with affiliates, we show that you really needn't give up much if any online ad revenues when you charge online, because you really don't reduce your traffic much. That's because you can use a variety of methods to maintain most of your current (free) page views, such as: only charging readers who visit online more than, say, five time a month; only charging readers who visit frequently and who are outside your geographic base (locally-based online advertisers aren't paying to reach them anyway; or allowing readers to sample the first two paragraphs of a story before asking them to pay. We have created about 15 such varieties of free visits/sampling/charging methods. All of them contradict the notion of some kind of magic "pay wall" suddenly coming down and charging everyone for everything.