Last week, the New York Times unveiled Times Select, a pay-for service where much of the paper’s unique content — mainly staff columnists — will now reside.

As happens whenever formerly free (“free” in a sense — see below) online stuff converts to paid, there’s been a lot of bitching. Eric at Off Wing brings up some good points against the move, including a comparison with another national newspaper’s recent Web moves:

In marked contrast, check out what the Washington Post is doing. Working with Technorati, they’re providing a list of blog trackbacks for many of their bylined stories. It’s a very blogger-friendly move, and one the Post ought to be congratulated on.

Indeed, I lauded the Post’s move, and noted that it’ll encourage me to point to their stories more often.

Of course, it’s important to note that neither the Times nor the Post offer completely unfettered access to their sites. Both require free registration — free as in money, if not in the personal information you have to give up (assuming you don’t cheat with fake info, or use BugMeNot). And linkrot sets in when stories convert into archives after a couple of weeks, although again, there are ways around that too. But overall, it’s been a reasonably friendly system for reader and blogger.

As another alternative to the rollout of Times Select, he also points to the Wall Street Journal’s model, which started out with 100 percent paid-subscription-only access but now teases effectively with free stuff:

But because they started out tight, the Journal can now afford to loosen things up, so when they do provide free content, folks are likely to praise them instead of knocking them for keeping the vast majority of their content behind a subscriber wall. And once exposed to this free content, a reader is more likely to become a paying subscriber.

As the Web guy for Florida Trend magazine, the online pay/free debate occupies my strategic planning. I’m well aware that Trend’s registration requirement is a turnoff for many potential readers, and so is subject to constant reassessment.

Ultimately, though, there’s a very good reason for the Times to start charging, and it has to do with the difference between “readers” and “subscribers”.

Simply put: For content producers, high levels of online traffic don’t really mean anything unless you can extract some money from it. That connection is often lost on observers, who trumpet how many eyeballs cruise onto a Web page, but it’s fundamental to how professional media works. Someone’s got to pay the writers/actors/musicians, and offering access to a targeted audience’s engaged attention is a juicy morsel.

Advertising is the obvious option, but difficult to aggregate online to the point where it produces enough revenue (syndicating advertising, like Google does, is a different story). Repackaging exclusive content into archives and special reports is another avenue, but not especially high-volume.

After that? Getting money directly from the enduser emerges as the moneymaker. As with the print product, subscriptions are the most reilable revenue stream for a media concern. Not only does it bring in hard cash over a proscribed period of time, it also creates a valuable channel: A subscriber’s information can be used for related marekting pitches, paying for itself several times over.

That’s the key. For the Times and its website, a paying customer is far more valuable than a regular visitor. As much as they might lose in traffic by putting up the Times Select fence, they’ll gain subscribers, which is the acceptable tradeoff. It really is trading quantity for quality.

Beyond that, I happen to think the part-free part-pay model works, much like it does for the Journal. I doubt that Times Select will ever grow to encompass the entire website, because so much of what’s reported in the Times can be found elsewhere on the Web (with varying degrees of coverage and focus, but still). But it’s ingenious to charge for the Times’ columnists — those unique content producers whose work represents the Times brand more than anything else. That can’t be reproduced elsewhere, and that makes it valuable, and thus worth paying for.

As for the rest of the site? The more general news articles serve as the teasers. Advertising can be sold there, and plenty of links can point to the enhanced coverage to be found in Times Select to convert a few more readers into subscribers. But this model only works if it’s applied to that content that’s unique to a particular new organization, whether it’s columnists, market analysts, etc.

The reason Times Select created so much noise was because the Grey Lady is something of a bellweather for online news media practices. If Times Select is successful — and I think it will be — it’ll be emulated by others. That’ll tick off bloggers and others used to the free linkage, but it’s hard to argue with a monetization strategy.