As Murdoch hesitates, there are no simple solutions over charging for digital content

So, this month, the pay walls begin to go up. The next edition of Retail Week you try to read on the internet will come as part of a subscription package, with 18 more Emap magazines waiting to pull the same trick. The days of "free", it seems, are coming to an end. But wasn't it only last November that the CEO of Emap said he was phasing out the pay walls he'd built? In, out, shake it all about?

And over the ocean, where the Supreme Leader once decreed every enclave of his empire would be a walled garden of profitability by June 2010? Well, says Murdoch, that may be slipping a bit, if not a lot. It seems damned difficult to talk to anyone without getting the anti-monopoly guys frothing. Cancel my last Earth-shattering diktat.

Meanwhile, while New York Times thinkers cudgel their brains and the rebuilding of their own (dismantled) pay wall proceeds at a sluggardly pace, the editor of the London Times has a short, shocking message for anxious staff: "It's a much tougher, more complicated decision than it seems to all the armchair experts. There is no clear consensus on the right way to go."

There ought to be a rough consensus; instead, there's a spiral of confusion. It begins in America. Reverberations of that latest 10.6% drop in US print circulations carried on all last week, but much of it feeds through as panic.

Take one stark contrast. Here's the San Francisco Chronicle, hailing a 25.8% circulation drop (because, in part, it put its cover price up around 60%). "Our reshaping the newspaper's business model is paying off financially even though, as anticipated, it has resulted in a sharp decline in circulation," its management claims. And here's the Newport Daily News on Rhode Island producing three tiers of pricing to help readers choose: $145 a year for the print version only, $245 for print plus online, and $345 for the full electronic edition.

Pause to make sense of that. Piling in web access on top and combining online and print readership figures to keep advertisers happy, the Chronicle is driving readers on to the net. The News, making its website ludicrously expensive, is doing precisely the reverse.

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