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.

Clear’s Web site says it will cease operations at 11 pm PDT tonight because parent company Verified Identity Pass is “unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations.” No word on what happens to the $128 that its 165,000 members each shelled out as a yearly membership fee.

I don’t normally write about shuttered travel companies, even those that raised $116 million since 2005. But readers of this column may find Clear’s failure worth noting because of a couple of the big media names associated with it.

Spark Capital, which led the $44.4 million round Clear announced less than a year ago, is a venture group that’s now best known as one of Twitter’s primary backers. This is the relatively young firm’s biggest dud, by a long shot. And Clear’s founder, Steve Brill, who stepped down as CEO in March, has been in media forever and used to be known as the guy behind Court TV and the American Lawyer. He’s now one of the three men pushing Journalism Online, which wants to run the payment infrastructure for a yet-to-be-created online content system.

By the way, the “family lanes” I’ve started seeing at some airports, designed for people who know they’re not going anywhere fast and are cool with that? Pretty good. Also: Free.

[Image credit: iowa spirit walker]

There are plenty of problems with this plan, and I think the biggest one is that there’s simply too much commodity content on the Web — stuff that doesn’t have any particular value to anyone, or at least not much more or less than something easily available somewhere else.

(Aside: The scenario above is great for Google (GOOG), which helps you find the commodity stuff no matter where it is, and bad for most publishers, who used to have control over their distribution. But I don’t see how you can blame Google for that.)

There are a couple exceptions that have worked so far, like the Wall Street Journal (which is owned by News Corp (NWS), which owns this site), and Consumer Reports. And even the New York Times (NYT) was able to convince some of its readers to pay to read the likes of Maureen Dowd via an experiment a couple of years ago and may try something like that again. But how many New York Times, Wall Street Journals and Consumer Reports are there?

But for argument’s sake, let’s say your local newspaper does indeed have some stuff that you can’t find anywhere else, and it wants to sell it to you. How would it do that?

Enter Journalism Online, a startup founded by media veterans Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery that wants to provide a backend service for papers that want to sell their wares. A few weeks ago I talked to Crovitz, who is the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and let him make his pitch.

They key point is that Crovitz and his colleagues don’t expect everyone to pay for everything on the Web — they figure that something like 5 to 10 percent of a publication’s readers will value the stuff enough to pay for complete access to everything, and that everyone else will be content to graze for free. That still sounds optimistic to me, but I’d love to be proved wrong.

If you’re looking for more details, here’s a link, via the awesome NiemanLab, to a deck from a presentation that Brill made to the hush-hush newspaper conclave in Chicago last week.