Information may want to be free, as an aphorism had it in the early days of digital media. But these days, increasingly, journalism wants to be paid for.
New York Media, the parent company of New York magazine, will become the latest publisher to institute a paywall when it starts charging for access to its websites.
Under its longtime editor, Adam Moss, New York was a pioneer breaking its various areas of coverage into separate websites known as verticals. Its related online offerings are composed of the flagship NYMag.com, The Cut (fashion), Grub Street (food), Intelligencer (politics), The Strategist (shopping) and Vulture (pop culture).
The move to a metered paywall has been in the works for a year, said Pamela Wasserstein, the daughter of the late New York magazine owner Bruce Wasserstein and the company’s chief executive since 2016.
“I think it’s the next evolution in what we do,” she added.
New York Media is now joining other publishing companies or individual publications that have recently added paywalls, including Bloomberg Media, The Atlantic and the Condé Nast magazines Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Wired.
Subscriptions for the New York Media sites will cost $5 a month or $50 annually. For $70 a year, the company will include a subscription to New York magazine, the onetime weekly that started publishing every other week in 2014.
The pay model, which will allow readers a number of stories free before shutting off access, will go into effect the last week of November, according to the company, which would not specify a date for the change.
NYMag.com will undergo a slight redesign at the same time. Mr. Moss said he planned to further incorporate the content from the various sites into the flagship site.
The paywall will not apply to The City, a soon-to-debut nonprofit site focused on coverage of New York City, which announced a partnership with the magazine in September.
With the magazine industry in financial trouble, the New York sites have maintained a loyal readership. According to Comscore, its family of sites had 29 million unique viewers in September, a 45 percent increase compared with last year. The print publication’s average circulation has held steady at over 400,000, with about 300,000 in home subscriptions and roughly 90,000 of that number denoting copies sent to doctors’ offices and other business locations.
In August, The Wall Street Journal reported that New York Media was exploring a sale. In an interview last week, Ms. Wasserstein said that interested parties had contacted her and she did not deny taking their inquiries seriously.
“Frankly, it’s nice that people find us interesting and are interested in what we do,” she said.
