As 2004 wore on, New York Times executives debated whether to charge for the website, but most of the discussion was on the business side. “The discussion, the debate—and it was a contentious one—was really between the print [business] people and the digital [business] people” says Nisenholtz, by then CEO of NYTimes Digital. The print business staff were afraid that the free website was cannibalizing print circulation, and so wanted to charge for the website. The digital side wanted to keep the website free so it could more rapidly increase readership, which translated to more ad revenue.

Bill Keller , who had been executive editor of the New York Times since July 2003, was inclined to explore a paywall. “My feeling was we’ve got to try things,” he says. ^[15] Many in the newsroom, however, “were sort of agnostic about it,” says John Geddes, then one of two managing editors. ^[16] Nisenholtz opposed charging for web subscriptions. “I thought it was a terrible user experience,” he remembers. “At that time, the advertising business was growing very, very rapidly and I didn’t want to do anything that got in the way of our growth.”

Industry-wide, advertising revenue was a bright spot. From 2003-04, print advertising revenues had increased from $44.9 to $46.7 billion, while online advertising had gone up from $1.2 to $1.5 billion. ^[17] But traditionally, newspapers revenue had come from both advertising and subscriptions. Sulzberger decided to try again with a paywall. “Advertising could only be part of the revenue stream,” he observes. It was also critical that the Times keep testing and learning. “If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got,” he says, quoting former Times CEO Russ Lewis.

In late 2004, the Times began building an  e-commerce system dubbed TimesSelect. Under the “partial paywall” scheme, news would remain free, but the opinion pages and archive would go behind a paywall. “The logic, very simply, was that opinion pages were the most differentiated content that the Times has. [Columnist] Tom Friedman only writes for the New York Times , he doesn’t write for anyone else,” observes Nisenholtz.

Gail Collins, editorial page editor at the time, and Andy Rosenthal , deputy editorial page editor since 2003, were not involved in the decision. “By the time I got engaged, it was Gail telling me that a decision had been made to try to charge for part of the paper,” recalls Rosenthal. ^[18] “And that they had selected the opinion section, specifically the columnists, for this experiment.”

Online Newsroom. Meanwhile, Keller was aware that online journalism was becoming more prevalent. Yet the structure of the Times did not reflect this. In 2005, the digital newsroom was “an orphan,” he says. The operation was housed in a separate building and it was tiny. This affected morale, says Keller. “Everybody in it felt like second-class citizens, and although we tried to sort of pat them on heads and assure them they weren’t, the fact is they were.”

Martin [Nisenholtz] used to refer to it as newspaper.com in a sort of disparaging way. And pretty much all newspapers were that way in 2005. The Web was a place that you put your newspaper when you were finished making your newspaper. It was not a venue for creating news. It was not a first place to put your news. It was an afterthought. And it dawned on me from spending some time with the people in digital that that was not going to be sustainable. [If] at some point print was going to go away, then everybody ought to be familiar with and skilled in the practices of digital journalism.

On May 27, 2005, Keller wrote a 10-page memo to Times Publisher Sulzberger, CEO Janet Robinson and Nisenholtz proposing to integrate the separate newsrooms. To shift NYT journalism from print to digital was a “central challenge” that required physically merging the two newsrooms. “This may be difficult politically, and it presents a variety of logistical problems… But I believe it is doable, and that it is imperative we try,” Keller wrote. The paper was slated to move into a new building in 2007. Keller said it should “seize the moment to combine the two newsrooms, and build an editorial infrastructure to create journalism with the online user in mind.” He concluded:

If we harness the creativity of the newsroom, we can move both our journalism and our revenue-generation online, and we can make a profitable venture of it. I don’t see that we have any realistic choice but to bet on that.

As it turned out, everyone agreed. “While I feel sheepish about the kind of revolutionary tone of my memo, I feel a certain amount of justified pride that ahead of a lot of other people, we agreed that we had to do that,” says Keller. He tapped Assistant Managing Editor Jonathan Landman , who had been at the Times since 1987 and had previously established a computer-assisted reporting unit, to manage the integration of the print and Web newsrooms.

In September 2005, Landman was named deputy managing editor for digital journalism. Another Times veteran, Rich Meislin , became associate managing editor. Meislin had started at the Times in 1975 as a copy boy, within a few weeks became Abe Rosenthal’s personal news clerk, served many roles on the print side including bureau chief in Mexico, and had been editor-in-chief of New York Times Digital from 1998-2001 before moving back to the print side as editor of Technology News.