I’ve had my share of disagreements with The New York Times editorial page over the years, but all I can say on the Gray Lady’s move to a pay wall later this month is “best of luck.”

It’s going to cost me $20 bucks a month to subscribe to the Times via IPad, but I will do so happily. That’s a bargain — less than I paid for a month’s worth of the hard copy Times 25 years ago.

The Times bean-counting staff is smart in how they are pursuing this. They are allowing occasional readers free access to 20 stories per month, and all readers can access an unlimited number of links forwarded to them by friends. In other words, it’s a sieve of loopholes to ease the public into the idea of paying for content again. Dropping an iron curtain on content would probably have been a critical mistake.

The entire publishing world will be watching to see how the Times does in this endeavor. If it fails, and fails badly, Americans can expect the quality of news coverage in the foreseeable future to decline precipitously. Quality newspapers require highly-trained journalists, and they need to feed their families, too. Whether you like The New York Times and what it represents or not, you should root unreservedly for its success later this month. Otherwise you’ll be relying on half-witted blogs like this one for your daily reading. That would be a disaster.