NEWS ON NEWS. It had been rumored for a while now, but today the New York Times announced that as of midnight tonight, they'll be bringing down pay walls on their website, exactly two years after they started charging $49.95 a year for complete access to the site. The pay wall was deterring drop-in readers who came to the site from search engines, and it wasn't bringing in enough paid subscribers to justify its existence. There were only 227,000 paying subscribers, and the site gets an average of 13 million unique visitors every month.