Will The New York Times bring back TimesSelect? Editor Bill Keller wouldn’t rule it out. In a Q&A with readers on the newspaper’s Web site that should be read carefully by media publishers, Keller was asked if the paper would consider charging for online content again. He said there were no plans on the books, but he suggested the TimesSelect program, that put some of the paper’s top columnists behind a pay wall and was abandoned in September 2007, wasn’t entirely wrong.

“Times Select was not the answer, but it’s possible we just put the wrong stuff behind the wall,” Keller wrote. “Maybe we should put it all there, or some different slice of it. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times both have paid tiers in their Web sites. Rupert Murdoch, when he bought The Journal, talked about making the Web site free, but then he decided it made better sense to continue charging.

Keller mused about a micro-payment model. “The idea is that readers may not pay a subscription fee for a new Web site, but they might pay a few pennies every time they click on a page, if it was simple and frictionless,” he said.

He also challenged the Internet mantra that information “wants to be free.” “Really good information, often extracted from reluctant sources, truth-tested, organized and explained — that stuff wants to be paid for,” he said.

Keller additionally speculated that The Times’ Kindle version might be the wave of the future: “The Times currently makes a modest amount of money selling a downloadable newspaper for Kindle users and for subscribers to a service called Times Reader. These services allow readers to load the entire paper into a portable device. In the case of Times Reader, the download has been especially designed to include full-color pictures, graphics and so forth. So some people are paying for The Times online. Just not enough of them.”

He then added: “So far.”