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For nearly 40 minutes, top executives from The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) took questions from interviewer Staci D. Kramer, co-editor and EVP of ContentNext Media, and participants in paidContent 2010. Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman and publisher; Janet Robinson, president and CEO; and Martin Nisenholtz, SVP-digital operations, knew the interest would be intense but while they were willing to buy lunch, they weren’t ready to feed the appetite for detail about plans for NYTimes.com to go metered in 2011. Instead, much of the focus was on strategy. Sulzberger insisted the new model isn’t intended to choke off traffic and new users, while Nisenholtz said the challenge is creating a model that charges while growing advertising—and Robinson tried very hard to convince people a meter isn’t a paywall. The Q&A includes exchanges with The Guardian‘s Emily Bell; Slate’s Jacob Weisberg and Reuters’ Felix Salmon.

This past Friday we had our first paidContent 2010 conference at NYC’s TheTimesCenter . During the jam-packed day we had a special lunchtime Q&A with The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) Company’s Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Janet Robinson and Martin Nisenholtz, and talked all things digital news, subscription models, big-media joint ventures and much more. Some highlights:

—@pc2010: NYT Metered Model Is Designed To Preserve Reach And Grow Ad Revs
—@pc2010: Yahoo’s Schneider On What The Microsoft Deal Means: ‘More Money’
—@pc2010: ‘Paid Services’ Coming To Reuters.com
—@pc2010: ‘Farm’ Talk With The Content Distributors
—@pc2010: FT.com’s Grimshaw: News Readers Are Willing To Pay—At Least For A Day
—Video @ paidContent 2010: New York Times Execs On Metered News And More

The rest can be seen in our paidContent 2010 archive.

Many thanks to everyone who took part (in person and virtually through Livestream) and a special thanks to our paidContent 2010 sponsors: Platinum: Oracle; Gold: Rubicon Project, Gigya, RR Donnelley and Lunch: The New York Times

The FT.com, whose metered model has been considered an example for other outlets, such as the NYTimes.com, has 1.9 million registered users, plus 121,000 paying subscribers, said the site’s Managing Director Rob Grimshaw in a Q&A with ContentNext Managing Editor Ernie Sander at paidContent 2010.

Grimshaw on why the FT is also offering micropayment options: Print subs is 200,000, but circ is 400,000. Half have no long-term commitment. Online is different. But we believe the patterns are similar. If we don’t offer that channel, we’ll never know. So it’s an experiment. We introduced a day-pass online in one market and see whether we can apply it to other markets.

Highlights from WSJ.com managing editor Kevin Delaney’s conversation with Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI) Markets CEO Devin Wenig (who, by the way, oversees $8 billion of paid content revenue):

—Reuters.com: Wenig says the company will add “paid services” on top of its news site this year. The site, he says, is getting 30 million unique users a month. As for cannibalization of its other businesses, Wenig says the company would rather have cannibalization come from within its company than from others.

Highlights from Rafat Ali’s conversation with Demand Media’s Shawn Colo, Discovery’s Bruce Campbell, Associated Content’s Patrick Keane, About’s Cella Irvine, and AOL’s Marty Moe:

—Gutters: Are the panel members—whose companies are sometimes referred to as “content farms”—driving the value of content to the “gutter?” Colo: No; “We’re adding value by allowing quality freelancers.” Moe: No; “Models are varying widely. A hybrid of full-time employment and freelance work.” Irvine: No; “We are absolutely uninterested in producing cheap content. We invest heavily in ‘guide’ selection and training.” Campbell: No; “We’re the last ones to want to destroy anyone’s content model.” Keane: No; “We are not a news site. We are not journalists. But we’re democratic and open.”