The recent stream of stories about newspapers charging for online access to their stories have largely focused on the Murdoch empire - the Wall Street Journal, the Sun, the Times and others.

The voices from elsewhere around the newspaper industry have been considerably quieter: the Guardian's Carolyn McCall suggesting the possibility of charging for specialist news or Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times telling shareholders that his title is "exploring a new online financial strategy".

That sounds dangerously vague - but more details on the NYT's plans emerged yesterday after talking points from a staff strategy meeting were published on Twitter.

The rough details of the meeting - held for news staff at the company's headquarters in Manhattan - have come to light thanks to a series of Twitter messages from Jennifer 8 Lee, a metro reporter at the newspaper.

In the messages, she described a sequence of ideas and points from senior newspaper executives, such as the fact that the company is looking again at the lessons learned from Times Select - its ill-fated attempt to charge for opinion columns.

Other points of interest include:

• That senior executives are considering introducing tiered memberships, modelled on the credit card industry (silver, gold, platinum and so on), which would give paying different levels of access to information on the New York Times website. They are also "rethinking" what level of access existing print subscribers should get as a matter of course.

• That the company is also exploring ways to recoup money from those who profit from infringing its copyright. At the moment NYT lawyers take one of two approaches to copyright infringement: either letting it ride, or choosing to "squash" infringers "like mosquitoes". They are now exploring a third way, which would involve convincing advertising providers – such as Google – to hand over a proportion of the profits made by infringing websites straight to the copyright holder.

• It is also setting great store by its application programming interface, or API – the system by which third party software developers can create services that use New York Times stories and content (the Guardian also runs a similar program, Open Platform). Senior managers expect the system to increase activity drastically – eventually bringing as many as 2.5 times more viewers to NYT stories than the NYTimes.com website itself. By charging for the API service (although it is not clear how) the title hopes to tap into "significant revenue streams".

Much of the information has already been made public by Sulzberger, and in stories about the company's strategy to fight off the recession and the crumbling of the newspaper industry.

But, given that it was staff who were made privy to this information and not shareholders, there was important detail here - and the approach towards Times Select remains one of the most intriguing.

Widely regarded by many as an attempt to impose a pay barrier on the least valuable part of the NYT's output, it appears executives are less critical about their decision with hindsight.

According to Lee, staff were told that "rollout was not so great at time of integration," and "taking away something that was free annoyed the blogosphere". The implication is that Times Select was more of a failure of marketing - because it was rolled out badly and annoyed bloggers - rather than a strategic error. Whether that is the best lesson to have learned is up for debate.

Similarly, the company admits that its idea about tiers of membership is problematic, but that although it is a strategy that represents "the highest risk" it also offer the "most potential reward".

What is clear from Lee's messages, however, is that the company – at least in this forum – remains bullish. It "significantly outperformed the market with display advertising" (even if nobody will publish figures to that effect) and that the company's rivals "make a lot less money than we do".

Despite evidence to the contrary, the NYT still believes in itself, and in its ability to navigate its way out of this economic swamp.

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