Depends. If I had to pay for all online content, I would probably reduce my sources to two or three. I am currently subscribed to WSJ and The Economist. NYT wouldn't be my third choice if I had to.
At the Economist, the mobile version of the printed edition is included in the online subscription.
Someone at Slashdot gave a good list of what news sites can do to fund their content:
- Ad-Supported Model: Consumers get the content for free as long as they are willing to watch & click-through enough ads. Sucks because people hate/block/avoid ads (insufficient revenues), although Google might make this work.
- BBC Model: An annual government tax on PCs is used to fund a quasi-independent news gathering organization. Sucks because it adds a tax, will never happen in the U.S. (due to freedom of the press and government non-compete issues), but it could happen in the UK.
- a la Carte Model: Every content creator charges their own subcription. Sucks if you want to read more than one source.
- Flat-Rate Integrator Model: A subscriber pays a monthly subscription for all the news/content aggregated by a given company (AOL, Yahoo, Google?). Sucks because snooty brand-conscious content providers (NYT, WSJ, etc.) will never join an aggregator -- they will prefer to force people to pay separate subscriptions for separate content sources.
- Micopayment Model: A subscriber pays-per-view, the charge showing up on their monthly ISP/cellphone/credit card bill. Sucks because the cost of admin and dealing with disputed charges wipes out most of the revenues. Sucks because people hate being nickled and dimed to death.