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Passage 3 Americas most popular newspaper website today announced that the era of free online journalism is drawing to a close. The New York Times has become the biggest publisher yet to set out plans for a paywall around its digital offering, _1_ the accepted practice that internet users will not pay for news. Struggling with an evaporation of advertising and a downward drift in street corner sales, The New York Times intends to introduce a metered model at the beginning of 2011. Readers will be required to pay when they have _2_ a set number of its online articles per month. The decision puts the 159-year-old newspaper on the charging side of an _3_ wide chasm (鸿沟)in the media industry. But others, including the Guardian, have said they will not _4_ internet readers. The New York Timess publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, _5_ that the move is a gamble. Boasting a print _6_ of 995,000 on weekdays and 1.4 million on Sundays, The New York Times is the third bestselling American newspaper, behind the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. While most US papers focus on a single city, The New York Times is among the few that can claim _7_ scopeas well as 16 bureaus in the New York area, it has 11 offices around the US and maintains 26 bureaus elsewhere in the world. But like many in the publishing industry, the paper is in the grip of a _8_ financial crisis. Its parent company, the New York Times Company, has 15 papers, but _9_ a loss of $70 million in the nine months to September and recently accepted a $250 million _10_ from a Mexican billionaire， Carlos Slim, to strengthen its balance sheet. | 
