In June, The Times and The Sunday Times of London will begin charging readers using their websites.

The decision to separate the newspaper’s online offerings for the first time and charge £1 for a day’s access marks a watershed in the relationship between readers and publishers.

The move will see The Times and Sunday Times join a small group of news organisations charging readers to access content online. The latest audacious bid by media mogul Rupert Murdoch represents one of the newspaper publisher’s biggest challenges since the Wapping dispute of 1986, which saw The Times re-locate from New Printing House Square in Gray's Inn Road near Fleet Street to new offices in Wapping.

Murdoch has long argued that web users should pay to access online news content. Faced with declining advertising revenues and circulation, the need for a viable and feasible charging regime for online content has become critical.

The media supremo has already accused Google of effectively stealing from publishers and last year indicated he would remove News Corp content from its search engines.

Critics suggested removing websites from such a huge source of traffic would be detrimental. However, Murdoch countered that the traffic – or clicks – from Google were not valuable as consumers read one article before leaving the site.

Murdoch faces an immense challenge –consumers have become accustomed to viewing content for free on the internet.  It will require a Herculean effort to bring about a change in attitudes and behaviour. Murdoch is also gambling that the move will not alienate existing users and see them move to free websites such as bbc.co.uk.

New Zealand media publishers such as Fairfax, which operates the stuff.co.nz website, will also be viewing these overseas developments with interest.

Like their UK counterparts, they are grappling with falling advertising revenue and circulation figures. The National Business Review has so far been the only major New Zealand national news outlet to dip its toe in the water with the launch of a premium paid content site.

However, a successful transition in the United Kingdom will no doubt hasten efforts to introduce a similar system here.