Given that some people spend $5 per day on coffee, paying that much per month for online access the best newspaper in the world strikes me as an absolute no-brainer. I myself would pay twice as much. I hope the idea catches on, and I hope this marks a shift from the days of newspapers panicking to the start of successful new business models.
One way the NYT can make online subscriptions far more appealing is by doing a better job of promoting the terrific new TimesReader 2.0, a simple but slick Adobe-based application that you install onto your computer in like two minutes. I've been meaning to plug this for a while, because it was only after I tried the incredibly user-friendly and print-like TimesReader that I could imagine surviving without the Times on paper. Among other things, it's most excellent for traveling, because it downloads the day's entire print paper (with regular auto-updates from the web during the day) and saves it offline on your hard drive, which lets you read it anywhere, regardless of whether you have an Internet connection. And!--yes, this is becoming a Ginsu knife commercial--TR saves the past seven days' papers in your computer, also offline, and all of it easily searchable. (It's also free to home delivery subscribers.) Congrats to the NYT for showing some real savviness here.
P.S. Wake up, Washington Post!: This thing blows your hapless and unwieldy digital reader out of the water.
--Michael Crowley