I haven’t done a ton of thinking yet on the New York Times’ plan to raise a pay wall in 2011. Now that I’m addicted to reading their Sunday Magazine and Health section, I’m even going to consider paying – but I’m debating what price is more than I’m willing to give them. Over at MediaShift, former Salon.com staffer Scott Rosenberg has some good things to say about pay walls, including this cautionary note on confusing readers:

…a confused reader online is an ex-reader. Once visitors encounter a barrier — or even if they get it in their heads that maybe there’s a barrier — they tend to go away and not come back. At Salon, our full pay wall was only in place for a handful of months, nearly a decade ago, and yet I still bump into people who tell me they don’t read the site because they don’t want to buy a subscription.