In a press release posted Wednesday, The New York Times Company announced that it would be building a pay-wall around much of its online newspaper content. The new system would be like that used at the Financial Times and other papers: you can read a certain number of articles for free each month, but a subscription is required for the rest. The company made clear, in the release as well as in a report by the Times’ own Richard Perez-Pina, that it hoped subscription revenue would augment its current online advertising income, which is substantial though insufficient to cover the enormous costs of running the paper. Perez-Pina’s report goes so far as to explain that readers will remain “able to read individual articles through search sites like Google, Yahoo and Bing without charge,” though after that first article “clicking on subsequent ones will count toward the monthly limit,” a policy likely intended to maintain traffic numbers and thus advertising income.

What wasn’t mentioned in the article or in the press release is that the Times Company is struggling, with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and an increasingly complicated cast of creditors, including Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim (which loaned the company $250 million, at 14 percent interest) as well as a $225 million sale-leaseback arrangement involving its corporate headquarters. And, as Michael Wolff has pointed out, these odd deals, and the general economic woes of the company, can be blamed squarely on Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., who is the same exec responsible for leading the pay-wall changes. Sulzberger has presided over a ten-year-long catastrophe at the Times that has come close to destroying the company. Most dramatically, Sulzberger spent some $2 billion dollars buying back stock (for which he paid more than $50 a share, nearly four times what it’s worth today). But he also ended the company’s previous experiment in charging for online access, Times Select, just before the advertising economy started to sink.

Opinion about the coming pay-wall is divided. Many industry analysts doubt the ability of the Times to charge for content and maintain its audience. Some readers have stepped forward saying they are happy to pay for content—because they value what the Times does. Others, like Wolff, have mocked the paper, saying that aggregators like his own Newser have the most to gain from the move since they can, after paying the Times‘ small subscription fee, simply summarize its expensive work and re-sell it…thus making advertising income without having the costs of staffing bureaus and copy desks.

But who’s to say that the Times plans on convincing all of its readers to pay? What’s much more likely is that the company will aim to persuade a small potion of its current audience, say 10 to 20 percent, to subscribe. This would put the site well into the norm of so-called “freemium” business models wherein 10 to 20 percent of customers pay for premium content and, in so doing, support a variety of other services.

What other services? Intelligent observers of the Times will have noticed by now that NYTimes.com has slowly become a huge (and elegant) aggregator of web content—content for which the Times doesn’t pay  anything for, though it surrounds it with advertising. Nearly every section of the Times’ site now points readers to items across the web, as well as to AP and Reuters wire stories. (Even the paper’s blogs have started pointing to other newspapers, especially on tough stories like the earthquake in Haiti. Here, for instance.) The site also features Blogrunner feeds, and content from a variety of outside partners, like tech stories from Gigaom, IDG, and VentureBeat. The paper’s Chicago coverage is now supplied by a non-profit, the Chicago News Cooperative. It’s blog “The Local,” focusing on Fort Greene, Brooklyn, is now run by CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Will these new resources be covered under the Times‘ coming pay-wall? It would seem not. Assuming the items have an audience, they would be best monetized by bringing in the largest number of readers and advertisers. Furthermore, no one should doubt that the Times will spend the next year getting deeper and deeper into the aggregation game. In order to preserve the sites’ current advertising income, the paper will need to further develop NYTimes.com such that it will be able to continue to attract a similar-size audience even after the pay-wall goes up. Otherwise advertising income, by all standard web logic, will fall.

There’s also another likely scenario: That the Times will get into the news-summary game, doing what sites like Newser, Slate, The Daily Beast and even MobyLives often do now: summarize Times stories in brief. After all, if the Times plans on putting its larger stories into a premium section, they may well find they need to comission non-premium versions of the same stories to keep readers coming. Although a short version of the Times may seem unappealing to hardcore readers, this isn’t true for all consumers of the news. A recent study showed, for instance, that nearly 50% of Google News users simply read the headlines.