Earlier today The McClatchy Co. gave a strong impression that 2010 is going to be a good year: online ad sales are on the rise (as they’ve been elsewhere in the industry) and circulation numbers are up. So why would the company start experimenting with pay walls for one of its newspaper’s Web sites, as CEO Gary Pruitt mentioned today in a media conference call?

Pruitt stressed that 44 percent of ad money was currently coming through digital channels last quarter, and that an ad-based revenue system “isn’t broken…but we’ll learn from everything.” So despite the fact that a pay wall will hit a newspaper — like McClatchy’s Kansas City Star — exactly where McClatchy is beginning to see some growth (circulation, online ad sales) the company is planning to try out a pay wall model for a yet-unnamed title, if only for “ideological” reasons.

There are few details available at the moment, but McClatchy’s pay wall system will resemble more Variety‘s plan than The Wall Street Journal‘s, with users being able to view a certain number of sites before they are asked to pay. We can’t blame McClatchy for trying a system that everyone from The New York Times to regional dailies believe is the future of online revenue, but we’re glad that they’re not jumping headfirst into a model that has yet to be proven as successful as print ad sales once were.

Read More: Commentary: McClatchy To Experiment with Pay Model –Editor & Publisher

Previously: Can Classifieds, Online Ads Save McClatchy?

How long have we been living under the looming shadow that is the threat of a New York Times‘ pay wall? The answer most likely is since TimesSelect’s fall in 2007, after the paper’s first attempt at getting online readers to pay for content.

Since then, publisher Arthur Sulzberger has made vague promises, culminating in today’s announcement of a plan to launch a metered pay model on NYTimes.com next year. It makes sense: last year saw the Times‘ hemorrhaging money (losing $35 million in the third quarter alone), and speculation that the paper wouldn’t make it to 2010.

Thankfully, Carlos Slim stepped in last year, but it still remains to be seen how the Grey Lady will make it back into the black. While alienating some readers, the metered system of content-charging that Sulzberger is planning may actually be the best compromise between giving away your product for free and going on almost total lock-down mode like the The Wall Street Journal. Under this plan, The New York Times will eventually allow you to read only a certain number of articles per month before asking you to subscribe, much like Variety or The Financial Times (although some have pointed out that the FT‘s model is looking more and more like the Journal‘s).

But even before today’s not completely unexpected announcement, media critics were chomping at the bit to react to the Times‘ possible pay plans. After the jump, a look at what some of them are saying.

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Cablevision‘s decision last October to put their Long Island paper Newsday behind a pay wall led to a lot of skeptics raising their eyebrows. After all, most newspapers that have tried charging for their online content have been major news organizations like The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, or niche publications like entertainment trade mag Variety.

And so far, the prospects have seemed grim: Newsday.com has seen a major dip in traffic, both from month-to-month and compared to last year, which has led to the paper having to issue statements to calm jittery advertisers. Newsday itself is currently in tense negotiations with its editorial union, which is expected to have to take a 10 percent pay cut. And to make matters worse, it was just discovered that ex-Cablevision subscribers using inactive accounts have been able to bypass the $5-a-week Newsday.com fee through a loophole in their service plan.

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The Wrap: Variety is up for sale after all.

NY Post: Amidst layoffs, AOL is still hiring, picking up a dozen staffers formerly of Conde Nast‘s shuttered Gourmet magazine to work for a food site the company hopes to launch next month.

Talking Biz News: BusinessWeek pulled a story about Twitter from its Web site after some bad math “rendered its premise incorrect.”

Mediaite: Ruth Reichl talks about the shock of Gourmet‘s closing.

As part of its expanding entertainment coverage, NYMag.com has hired its first West Coast editor.

The New York magazine site announced yesterday that Claude Brodesser-Akner, a media and entertainment reporting veteran, would be joining the team of its Vulture blog. Brodesser-Akner has been covering the industry since 1996, working for Mediaweek and Variety, editing our sister site FishbowlLA and creating the weekly public radio show “The Business.” He also helped launch TMZ.com and served as the Los Angeles bureau chief for Advertising Age. He was most recently a contributor for Wired.

This latest hire is part of NYMag.com’s plans to expand its entertainment and culture coverage, led by former Entertainment Weekly editor Josh Wolk, who joined the site in November.

Previously: Entertainment Weekly Editor Joins NYMag.com

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Ever since Nikki Finke sold her blog Deadline Hollywood Daily to Mail.com Media Corp. in June, we’ve been looking forward to see who she would hire as New York editor as Deadline expands to become a bicoastal pub.

Last night Finke announced that she had chosen Mike Fleming, a 20-year Variety veteran, to helm her East Coast operations, to be called Deadline New York. She’s also brought on Tim Adler to lead Deadline London.

As editor of Deadline New York, Fleming will cover “film and television dealmaking and production and casting,” and is looking forward to “expand[ing] his turf by breaking news and offering analysis about books, media, TV news, theater, and other Gotham-based infotainment arenas.”

Fleming’s hiring has tongues wagging all over Hollywood, reports our sister pub FishbowlLA. His departure might mark the end of Variety‘s relevance, but it looks like Deadline.com will now be getting a whole new set of readers. New York media watchers, take note.

Read the full press release here.

Previously: Nikki Finke’s Looking To Hire NY-Based Reporter

When entertainment industry trade Variety decided to put its online content behind a pay wall earlier this month, it promised options for how users would go about paying. (Random selection being one of the more out there ideas we’ve heard for pay walls, but hey, everyone is trying something new.)

Other Web sites like those belonging to The Financial Times have embarked on a plan that would eventually allow users to purchase individual articles for a small fee, much like buying a song from iTunes for 99 cents instead of the whole album for $10.

Media analysts don’t necessarily agree that bringing down the price of content (even if it costs customers more money in the long run) will make potential readers take out their wallets. Jay Rosen New York University journalism professor, Bryan Keefer of The Daily Beast and Josh Benton of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab both see the chink in pay walls’ armor as being that the majority of people just won’t pay for content in its current state, period. (Rosen actually predicted the paradoxical idea of paid-for “exclusivity” appealing to link-obsessed readers in a 2005 article for The Huffington Post.) So the people already paying for subscriptions will continue to pay, and the rest won’t be typing in their credit card information, no matter how small the fee is.

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This year — full of flux and uncertainty about where the media is heading — has resulted in a vast number of job changes and departures across all matter of media companies and publications. In almost every field of journalism, big names have either been fired, promoted, retired, or simply moved on to more lucrative positions. Here, we take a look back at the biggest industry shakeups of 2009.

The Biggest Move in Magazines: Stephen Adler leaving BusinessWeek.
When editor Stephen Adler announced his departure from BusinessWeek this October following the magazine’s sale to Bloomberg LP, he wasn’t just making a statement, he was starting a trend. Soon he was followed by some of his former colleagues, like John Byrne and BusinessWeek‘s president Keith Fox, who decided to stay with magazine’s original parent, McGraw-Hill. (Not to mention all of those who involuntarily left the pub not long after.) It takes a lot of chutzpah to up and quit your editor gig in the middle of this turbulent media landscape, it takes even more to get your coworkers to come with you. Fortunately for Adler, he’s already landed another gig at Thomson Reuters.

Runners Up: Time.com managing editor Josh Tyrangiel comes on board as editor at Businessweek; Marie Claire‘s publisher Susan Plagemann joins Vogue; Nancy Berger Cardone of shuttered Gourmet takes Plagemann’s spot at Marie Claire; Janice Min leaves Us Weekly; Mariette DiChristina becomes Scientific American‘s first female editor-in-chief.

More after the jump

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PRNewser: Should news organizations like The New York Times release the names of staffers who are laid off when they know the media will report on them either way?

Folio: Industry group the Magazine Publishers of America has eliminated 5 positions or 14 percent of its overall workforce.

Denver Busines Journal: Rick Blair has officially been named CEO of Clarity Digital Group and Examiner.com, after serving as interim CEO since March.

Vanity Fair: Putting Stephen Colbert on the cover of a magazine seems like a surefire way to boost newsstand sales. Not so with Jon Stewart.

Deadline Hollywood: Nikki Finke‘s blog amassed more unique visitors last month than Variety and The Hollywood Reporter combined.

Variety announced today that it hopes to introduce its new pay wall plan in stages. And unlike other publications, which only give you a blurb before asking you to register, starting tomorrow Variety.com will allow readers to access two whole pages of content before randomly selecting one in ten readers to ask to subscribe.

Eventually, Variety is hoping to only allow non-members access to five pages of free content a month.

Variety is taking a risk by being one of the first niche publications to enact an online pay wall. Hopefully Nikke Finke won’t just go and take all of its readers right out from under its nose.

Read More: Variety.com Going Behind Paywall, Again; Apes FT.com’s Model –paidContent