After months of saying that it is planning to launch a paywall, the New York Times said it is finally ready to begin charging for content "shortly," according to AFP.

Meanwhile, the Dallas Morning News on Tuesday launched a paywall on its site, reported the editorsweblog.

"Boldly going where others have yet to go," publisher Jim Moroney said in an email that the decision to charge for content "is straightforward: Online advertising rates are insufficient at the scale of traffic generated by metro newspaper websites to support the businesses they operate. We need to find additional and meaningful sources of revenue to sustain our profitability as we journey further into the digital marketplace."

Although the New York Times paywall is in its "final testing phase," details about how much users will pay -- readers will be charged according to a metered system based on the number of articles accessed -- still are vague, according to The Village Voice.

With readership and advertising revenues declining, newspapers are looking for new ways to pay the bills. But a paywall isn't going to fix the fundamental problem: virtually limitless news and information available for free online. As Mathew Ingram wrote for GigaOM, "The reality is that the biggest problem for traditional newspaper companies — a combination of high costs and falling ad revenues — isn’t something a paywall is going to help solve. At best, it is a stopgap measure that might slow their decline somewhat, and an ultimately futile attempt to reimpose scarcity on their content in an age when the supply of free content is virtually unlimited, thanks in large part to the rise of new-media entities such as the Huffington Post."