This must be welcome news indeed for News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch, who would have begun to feel just a little alone on a very high limb after announcing last August that his newspapers were planning to start charging for content.

But now The New York Times, arguably the most famous and influential daily newspaper in the United States, has said it is formulating plans to introduce a system in 2011 that will provide readers with a limited amount of free content and then start charging them.

Now that the NYT has weighed in, both Murdoch and the New York paper’s proprietors, the Ochs Sulzberger family, will be hoping desperately that others in the industry will follow suit.

Since buying The Wall Street Journal in 2007, Murdoch has warmed to the business paper’s highly successful paid-content web model but his News Corp has yet to take any concrete steps to roll it out to its other newspaper brands, which include the New York Post and The Times and The Sun in the UK.

Nonetheless, Murdoch has clearly signalled what just about everybody in the media and marketing industry already knew: that newspapers are haemorrhaging readers and are failing to migrate advertising revenues to their sister web brands.

This is a fundamental problem for the industry. With more people – particularly younger readers – turning to the web for their daily dose of news and information, as well as content that informs and helps them in their working lives, newspaper brands have to make their online operations start to pay. And they have been singularly unsuccessful at doing this.

Unfortunately, a decade of free newspaper launches, the emergence of Google and loads of free online content available on websites run by the media owners themselves have conditioned the great mass of readers consuming daily news to believe that content is a free commodity – water from a well that they should be able to dip into and drink from any time they want at no cost.

Of course, as Murdoch himself has pointed out, there is a great cost to producing useful and credible content. To start, for each article there is the digging, the research, the filtering of information, the interviewing of sources, the checking of facts and the distillation of all this material into a digestible story. That all takes a great many man-hours put in by trained, professional journalists.

That has to be paid for and online advertising is just not cutting it as far as revenues go, so Murdoch, the Ochs Sulzbergers and most likely a number of other bigtime newspaper publishers are looking at the paid subscription model as a possible salvation.

The trouble is they need everyone in the newspaper business everywhere to buy into the idea of charging for content – and of their own accord, as anti-trust authorities won’t like them to hold a big board meeting like a bunch of James Bond villains and decide to cut off free content collectively.

If readers can simply click onto another site or search through Google and get very similar content for free, then those that are charging will find themselves with very few readers very quickly. And in the UK there is the prickly issue of the BBC website, which has its own remit and the license fee – and certainly does not seem to be positioning itself to charge for content any time soon.

Of course, many in the industry will worry that ultimately readers won’t pay for content anyway. It is one thing to get the investment community and financially motivated individuals to pay for access to the business coverage in the online archives of The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, but will they pay for general news, human interest stories, sports, or arts and entertainment?

It remains a leap of faith – and a big gamble – for the newspaper owners that go for the paid online model. A media brand that starts charging for content risks completely eroding a following on the internet that it would have spent years building. But with online ad revenues coming up short while the newspapers shed readers and advertisers on the print side, do the owners really have any choice at this point?