If that time frame puzzles you, you’re not alone. Plenty of pundits are wondering what kind of digital wall could possibly require a year’s worth of assembly. Can’t you just slap this stuff up pretty fast? It’s the Internet, after all.

New York Times (NYT) Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and CEO Janet Robinson, in their memo to employees, stress that the paper is moving with “appropriate care” in the next 12 months because “it will take time to get this right.”

Perhaps there are other reasons to move slowly. The duo’s memo, for instance, holds out the possibility that the paper might end up working with a partner. Steve Brill’s Journalism Online consortium, which is promising to create pay walls for a large number of papers, would be one option.

And last I heard, some News Corp. (NWS) officials were holding out hope that the Times could join its pay wall consortium. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.) If the Times does want to play well with others, moving slowly might make some sense while it waits for said others to catch up.

Meanwhile, some cynics (gasp!) have suggested that the Times announcement is merely a trial balloon. Though I have to confess I don’t see what that would accomplish.

But assuming the paper does go it alone and does intend to build this thing, would it really take a year? Yes, say two publishing sources with first-hand knowledge of both pay walls and big publishing companies.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that there are at least three different problems to solve: Authenticating current print subscribers so that they can get the online paper free; installing the “meter” that measures use for nonprint subscribers; and creating a commerce engine that can take orders, process subscriptions, figure out how to provide bundled offers–i.e., the cost of online access plus, say, a Kindle or Apple (AAPL) tablet subscription–etc.

None of this stuff ought to be rocket science, but that doesn’t mean it’s not hard, my pay wall experts say. Even if the Times builds its new pay wall on the bones of Times Select, the newspaper’s 2005-2007 attempt, it could easily take it a year to assemble this thing, they insist.

It’s possible that my sources are talking their book a bit–if building a pay wall were easy, there’d be less work for them. But I’m willing to take them at their word until someone convinces me otherwise.

Representing new media, in a discussion over the future of journalism, are Federated Media’s John Battelle; Marissa Mayer, who leads Google’s (GOOG) search services and consumer products like Chrome; and Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times (NYT), and The Wall Street Journal’s top editor, Robert Thomson, stand in for the old guard.

Aggregator sites like Huffington Post and online portals like Yahoo (YHOO) and Google have seen their readership, advertising revenue and influence increase. Meanwhile, traditional-media types have criticized these forces for unfairly leeching their reporting and hurting their business models. We’ll be alert for verbal sparring.

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That’s the message Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Chief Executive Janet L. Robinson tried to deliver to the Globe’s employees this morning, reports…the Boston Globe.

Given that the Times engaged in some white-knuckled negotiating to get the paper’s unions to agree to big pay cuts and other concessions, repeatedly said that the Globe is bleeding red ink and has extended the bidding deadline for prospective Globe buyers, that seems like a hard message to deliver. Especially if you’re delivering it to crabby, ink-stained wretches.

The Globe, however, says the meeting was “largely civil.” But not entirely:

Today’s meeting, which lasted just over an hour, marked the first time Times Co. executives have met with Globe employees in more than a year. A common complaint among Globe employees was that the most senior Times Co. executives did not travel to Boston for a face-to-face meeting with employees at which they might have explained the paper’s financial condition and made the case for sacrifices.

The meeting today was contentious at times, as classified sales employee Jeanne Shimkus drew a smattering of applause when she attacked the Times Co. executives for imposing cuts on employees and questioned their credibility. “I have no respect for anything you say. And I don’t believe a word you say,” Shimkus said.

Sulzberger quickly moved on to the next question. “If you have no respect for anything I say, and you don’t believe anything I say, then we don’t have the basis for a conversation and a dialogue,” he told her.

The New York Times turned down a chance to borrow money from Hollywood mogul David Geffen last winter, and went with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim instead.

So says he New Yorker, which has an extensive profile of Slim in this issue. Writer Lawrence Wright says that when Geffen learned that the Times was working on a deal to borrow $250 million from Slim, he offered to make the loan on the same terms, but was rebuffed by  Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

The Times chairman, Wright says, told Geffen’s people he preferred to work with Slim because the telco billionaire already owned Times shares and because “he was reportedly also worried about Geffen’s ambition to take over the company.”

Where would Sulzberger have gotten that idea? From Geffen, of course.

Wright also reports that Geffen offered to buy the publisher outright last September; he says Geffen made the offer via Steve Rattner, the media banker turned Obama adviser who is one of Sulzberger’s closest confidants.

The pitch: Sulzberger would oversee the New York Times’s (NYT) editorial operations, Geffen would handle the business side, and eventually the entire business would be handed over to a nonprofit foundation. Obviously, Sulzberger turned that one down.

Wright’s piece–which is behind a pay wall, so it will be interesting to see how much of the story gets circulated via the Web–is first and foremost a profile of Slim, and secondarily about the Times. So it doesn’t spend much more time on Geffen or the notion of other white knights for the paper, a la Google (GOOG).

But in just a few paragraphs, the article does seem to sketch out Geffen’s desire to associate himself with the Times in whatever way he can: Buying it outright, lending it much-needed money or buying some of its stock (via Harbinger Capital).

For now, the Times is controlled by Sulzberger and his extended family, who have repeatedly insisted that they’re not interested in parting with it. Then again, that’s what the Bancroft family always said about Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. And those properties are now a part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (NWS)–as is this Web site.

If the Times ever does need a deep-pocketed buyer, Geffen has made it very clear he’s available.

The new Kindle that Jeff Bezos unveiled today came more or less as advertised–it looks and acts the same as the Kindle 2, but flaunts a much bigger screen.

And a much bigger price tag. The $489 retail price Amazon rolled out today seemed to take some of the air out of the auditorium at Pace University, where Bezos showed off the device. But I’m not sure that anyone was overwhelmed with the DX to begin with. “It’s like the Kindle 2.5,” quipped a publishing executive sitting next to me.

I think the Kindle does have promise as a college textbook replacement, but that’s going to take a while. Amazon and six schools are testing out the gadget this fall, but just barely–an estimated 300 students will get their hands on one.

And if Amazon (AMZN) wants to position the DX as a device to help revive the dying newspaper business, it’s going to have to make sure that the newspapers are actually gung-ho about the idea. For now at least, they seem to have reservations–which is why the Washington Post and New York Times are only willing to subsidize the gadgets for people who live outside of delivery zones.

EARLIER:

Big questions at the newest Kindle unveiling at Pace University today:

• Will the Kindle 3.0 save newspapers?
• Will the Kindle 3.0 save students money on textbooks?
• Will the Kindle 3.0 help cement the gadget’s promise as the iPod of e-books?

I can answer some of this in advance:

• No.
• Maybe. But not in the near future: Academia moves very, very slowly. So even if the Kindle 3.0 is an instant hit on campuses, it will take a very, very long time for most students to use the gadgets for most of their coursework.
• Apple’s (AAPL) rumored tablet may have something to say about that.

I’m covering the event live. Please refresh for the newest info, which will appear at the top of my transcript, below.

11:08: Demo’s over. Air is let out of the room with that price.

11:06: Bezos himself has yet to mention price. Other details: 9.7-inch display. 3.3 GB of storage. Native PDF support. There’s the price: $489. Audience: “Ouch!”

11:05: Meanwhile, CNET’s Ina Fried points us to the Amazon.com preorder page, which says the machine will sell for a whopping $489.

11:03: To be clear: The problem was with the projection at Pace, not the Kindle itself.

11:01: “I’m going to choose to find this hilarious.” Screen fixed now. Now looking at a New York Times page. Now the screen is dead again. “You may just have to do your demos outside.” Bezos soldiering through. “I don’t think it makes sense to continue with the demo.” And now it’s fixed again!

10:59: Shows off document on rockets. “I know, I know.” Some tech difficulties with big-screen displays here at Pace. Image is backward. Bezos is game: “That’s not a feature that will be available….Think of yourself as looking through a mirror.”

10:57: Time for a demo. Showing off SEC filings, radar maps, analyst reports. Sheet music. And you know what? They look great.

10:54: New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. comes onstage. Our “embrace” of the Kindle DX demonstrates that we’re interested in using all platforms. But this is an “experiment.” “Thank you, Amazon.com, thank you Jeff, for helping to boost [reporters'] book sales.”

10:53: What about newspapers?

This summer, three newspapers have agreed to pilot Kindle DX. They’re going to offer the DX for reduced price in exchange for long-term subscriptions. The papers are the New York Times (NYT), Boston Globe and Washington Post (WPO).

10:50: “We’re going to get students with smaller backpacks. less load. easier access.” Schools testing the Kindle are, as previously advertised, except not Pace University itself. Now Case Western President Barbara Snyder is reading statement, a bit stiffly.

10:47: Most of the documents we read are 8.5-by-11 inches. The information is structured to be read that way. “Even with electronic paper, you need a big display.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Kindle DX.”

As advertised, it’s a large-format Kindle. Apologies for lag. Wi-Fi problems here at Pace.

“I’m very excited to announce today that we’ve reached agreement with three leading textbook publishers that represent 60 percent of the market: Pearson, Cengage Learning and Wiley.”

10:43: Now on to the problem with paper: “The paperless society never came. We print more paper now than we ever have before. Computers have proliferated. And so have their evil companion, the ink toner cartridge. We sell a lot of these….The reason we print so much is that computer displays are worse display devices than paper. Paper is just better. It’s worth the hassle of printing.”

10:41: Next, a sales pitch reiterating Kindle’s advantages. Some head-nodding in the audience.

10:37: Bezos onstage. Kindle book sales now account for 35 percent of all book sales for titles available in both e-book and physical forms. This is up from 13 percent. A spike occurred when the Kindle 2.0 launched.

Here he is in 1995, at a Harvard University forum on journalism in the “on-line era,” thinking outloud about the ways his company might make money in the Internet era.

This is all an experiment. We don’t know where this is going. In the end, it’s going to have to pay for itself. We do know that. In the end, it’s going to have to pay for itself. And there’s not a lot of ways to make money.

As far as I know, there are only four–three, if you exclude blackmail–“Mr. Roberts, I won’t put that information up in exchange for $100,” which may be the only way to make money at this business today. Either the reader is going to pay or the advertiser is going to pay, or we’re going to get a piece of the transactional action. If the reader decides that she wants to get theater tickets from the Shubert organization for “Cats,” one, we’ll try to talk her out of it, but if she still goes out to see “Cats,” then maybe we’ll get, you know, one one-hundredth or one-tenth, or whatever the heck it is, of that transaction.

I had no idea Sulzberger harbored such an anti-”Cats” bias. Who knew?

I’m also not sure what to make of the fact that the Times–and everyone else in the news business–is still struggling with online economics 13 years later. Should the industry get credit for grappling with a problem that’s much harder than it looks? Or should our collective big brains have resolved this one by now?

Thanks to Harvard’s excellent Nieman Journalism Lab for digging up the transcript of the forum, which also featured tech pundit Esther Dyson; Walter Issacson, who was at the time a top executive at Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc.; and Frank Daniels III, publisher of the now-defunct Nando.net. You can read the entire thing (warning: very, very long)  below.

The bad news: It’s 2009, and he doesn’t know what that overhaul should be.

Back to the good part. In a thoughtful speech he delivered at Stony Brook University on Long Island last week, Sulzberger did a nice job of laying out how the Times got to the position it’s in now–watching print dollars shrivel up while online dollars trickle in. Can’t argue with any of this:

* Let us start with the fact that a deep, cyclical downturn has dramatically affected key areas of commerce, including the real estate, employment, automotive and retail industries, the lifeblood of American newspapers and local television.
* The Internet has proved to be a far superior advertising platform for listings. The classified businesses are disappearing from newspapers and are unlikely to migrate in any significant way to news Web sites.
* Selected display categories are also subject to secular shifts as users move from print to digital consumption. Beyond that, marketers are growing skeptical of the ability of display ads on any platform to capture the consumer’s attention in a fragmented media landscape.
* And, Internet businesses have proven incapable of replicating the economics of print. Few people have been willing to pay for online news. Advertising rates for online inventory are relatively low. And news Web sites are poorly organized to take advantage of the contextual advertising model that dominates the Internet.

So what to do? Alas. “It is a little bit like the banking crisis. We know there is an answer out there somewhere, but we are not sure what it will turn out to be.”

Sulzberger does say, as his employees have mentioned before, that the Times will probably need to start charging some people some amount of money for its online product. But he also suggests that the bulk of the Times will remain free online because “we do not want to take any steps that significantly reduces our presence on the Web.”

He also makes a vague reference to “the protection of intellectual property,” though I think the paper has recently been demonstrating what that means. And he also insists that the paper won’t give up its print product, because “it is still a popular and profitable medium.”

In the end, Sulzberger basically punts: “What we have learned over the last decade and half is that the Web has very few generally accepted rules for financial success, and they are inevitably overturned by the next digital cycle and next breakthrough algorithm.”

The rest of the speech, available here, is well worth reading. But if you’re one of the people who despairs about the paper’s future–or finds delight in the notion of its demise–you may not find anything here that changes your mind.

Steve Rattner (pictured here), once one of the the most prominent bankers in the media business, is going to Washington after all. Except that the Quandrangle Group founder won’t be getting the “Car Czar” job he was originally supposed to take in the Obama administration, since that job never got created.

Instead, Rattner will be… something sort of like a Car Czar. But his official title will be “adviser.”

The New York Times explains the difference:

Mr. Rattner, 56, will advise Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Lawrence H. Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, on reorganization efforts by General Motors and Chrysler, two carmakers that are receiving federal bailout money.

He was widely considered the front-runner to become the car czar, the Obama administration’s point person in mediating negotiations involving G.M. and Chrysler and parts suppliers, bondholders and unions. The car czar would have had a direct oversight role for the industry but the administration did away with that position last week, placing the auto bailout talks under Mr. Geithner and Mr. Summers. Mr. Rattner will still play a similar role but in an advisory capacity.”

Rattner is a former Times reporter who moved up quickly through the investment banking world and then formed Quadrangle in 2000. Which meant he rode the private equity/cheap debt roller coaster all the way up, and then back down. Big clients included Comcast (CMCSA), Sony (SNE) and Cablevision (CVC)–and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who hired Quadrangle to manage his assets via a blind trust.

That relationship will continue, even though Rattner is unwinding his connections to Quadrangle–the company’s  Web site has already wiped him away. And Rattner will presumably continue to offer advice to his longtime pal, New York Times Co. (NYT) chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

In other Barack Obama/media exec news, the White House has formally announced some of its digital hires. Former Blue State Digital consultant Macon Phillips, who most recently ran Obama’s Change.gov site, is his Director of New Media.

And, as I reported last month, former Google (GOOG) manager Katie Stanton will be Phillips’s Director of Citizen Participation.

More details from CNET here.

Tough news for the Sulzberger clan, which has been living quite well off the Times’s dividend for a long time. And yet another sign that the paper’s cash crunch hasn’t been eased just because it was able to secure a high-interest loan from Carlos Slim last month.

NYT chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. on the move: “Today’s decision provides the Company with additional financial flexibility given the current economic environment and the uncertain business outlook…we have taken decisive steps to reduce capital spending, lower operating costs and re-evaluate our assets.”

The Times has made a variety of cash-saving/raising moves over the past few months, and still has a few others in the works: It’s trying to find someone to buy its stake in the Boston Red Sox, as well as its stake in its new headquarters.

As of last fall, the paper was insisting that it wouldn’t lay off any of its 1,300 newsroom employees. But things have only gotten worse since then.

I stopped on by Google’s Zeitgeist yesterday to say hello to Washington Post CEO and Chairman Don Graham, who was attending the search giant’s annual confab of powermongers, where they talk about big issues and mostly engage in Olympic schmoozing.

I had used my old boss Graham to make a point about the immature nature of Facebook apps in a post Tuesday. (He had sent me a digital “Hot Potato” that prompted my diatribe, so I wanted to make sure he knew it was not personal that I was not tossing it back or wherever one was supposed to toss one.)

Zeitgeist sessions are off the record, although it was crawling with press, including bigwigs like Graham and New York Times head Arthur Sulzberger Jr., as well as a spate of other movers and shakers like (Google favorite) former Vice President Al Gore.

So, given the restrictions, I decided to use my visit to further my ongoing quest to ask Web players about what’s new and what’s hyped. While there, I put the screws to longtime Internet serial entrepreneur Yossi Vardi (ICQ among others) and also Dow Jones Online President Gordon McLeod in what is a very short video.

Here it is:

It’s working! We’re now hovering near $10,000 with 35 donors and solidly in the No. 2 slot, although Wilson does march on like Sherman to the sea with $16,566 and 61 donors.

So go now and to click on through to our AllThingsD page on DonorsChoose.org here or use the thermometer on the left side of this page to give early and often!

We are nearing the halfway point of the October Tech Blogger Challenge for DonorsChoose.org, which funds classroom projects in high-need public schools, using the Web to match teacher project requests with donors. AllThingsD picked tech projects in both San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

Besides raising funds for kids who need it, we also hope to win an award Yahoo is sponsoring for the tech blogger who garners the biggest number of donors–a free lunch with CEO Jerry Yang! And it must be ours!

Thus, it’s time for a Web celebrity endorsement! So, here’s Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post, which recently got into a little bit of controversy when one of its top execs said they’d never pay their bloggers!

Well, I didn’t pay her either and absolutely did not hand her her lines at all–except, well, all of them.

Although New York Times poobah Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who was passing by when I was making the video at Google’s Zeitgeist event yesterday, did jokingly chastise me for telling her what to say, it was actually the whole point of egregious fund-raising tactics. (But thanks, Arthur, for keeping me honest!)

So, remember to click on through to our AllThingsD page on DonorsChoose.org here to give early and often!

And here’s the video: