The Times newspaper published a leader today which explained why it believes charging for online content is the only way to maintain journalistic standards.

This newspaper invests in its journalism. That is how we are able to send correspondents into the natural carnage in Haiti or the man-made disaster in Sri Lanka. It is how we provide the most widely-read business pages of any daily newspaper. It is how we are able to offer more experience of covering politics than any rival at the same time as maintaing correspondents concerned with, for example, the ocean and the Pentagon, a former England captain on cricket and a column on bird-watching.

Independent, high quality journalism of this kind is anything but worthless. On this simple proposition, we are doing something that has not been done before but we are doing it certain that such an initiative is much less of a risk than failing to take the initiative.

Times readers have come to expect the breadth, the depth and the insight we try to offer them. But to ensure we able to continue to offer it we need our journalism to rest on a sound economic foundation. We believe that by asking a modest but fair price — just £2 a week for access to both the Times and the Sunday Times, with existing print subscribers getting access included — we will be able to secure this foundation.

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The news business has, for a long time, talked about managing decline. But the internet need not be a threat to newspaper journalism. It can be an opportunity to change the question, to one about growth. Publishing online allows us to display our photography in new ways, to use video to add an extra dimension to our story telling, to provide comment and analysis as news breaks and to reach readers all over the world. Most important of all, the internet allows us to build an even closer relationship with readers. Readers can communicate with journalists, debate with columnists and form a community of interest through The Times.

The purpose of charging for content and of the new website that we will be launching at the sametime is to offer readers the same values, integrity and quality of judgment on the news while taking advantage of all the versatility that digital media offer to examine those stories in more vivid ways.

There are those who argue that it is in some way contrary to the “spirit of the internet” to charge for content. This is an absurd contention. The internet is one vast free market. Indeed it is the critics who fail to understand the net. In the early days it might have been possible to regard online publishing as merely a marketing teaser to encourage print sales. Years later, the internet has grown up and grown out of this. It is a proper platform for publishing a newspaper and we propose to treat it as such. Some also argue that internet users will not be willing to pay for content online. We believe readers and potential readers are willing to pay a fair price.

In the years to come, sustained by the policy we announced yesterday, The Times will be published in many different digital forms, making it available to many new readers and allowing us to make use of some very exciting new devices and ways of displaying our content. But throughout it all we will remain in one way unchanging. We will remain distinctly, uniquely, always The Times.