At least that seems to be the strategy. According to MarketWatch (NYT.com to charge for Op-Ed, other content as of Sept):

The New York Times Co. (NYT) on Monday said that, starting in September, access to Op-Ed and certain of its top news columnists on the paper's NYTimes.com Web site will only be available through a fee of $49.95 a year. The service, known as TimesSelect, will also allow access to The Times's online archives, early access to select articles on the site, and other features. Home-delivery subscribers will automatically receive the service, the NYT said.

Ezra Klein (One Last Times):

I'd guess that the hits and discussion generated by the Times' op-ed writers convinced the paper's higher-ups that their opinion page was a must-read and people would follow it behind a subscription wall. They're wrong. The Washington Post has a great op-ed lineup with a terrible site layout, and the LA Times has an occasionally decent piece with a marginally better html scheme. Give them a web designer and the two could easily supplant the NYT's spot as the go-to op-ed source because, in the end, we're not really looking to read the writers, we're simply searching for a stupid or brilliant paragraph that we can write about, and those paragraphs, unfortunately for the Times, can be found most anywhere you look. Till now, searching for them on Keller's sheet was the blogosphere's habit. Demand a toll for it, however, and that habit will instantly change.

William Strunk once said that to air one's views gratuitiously is to suggest that the demand for them is brisk. Well, in our age of blog, there's a lot of gratuitous airing, and one can't help but suspect that—if the laws of supply and demand hold—that makes it a less-than-propitious time to start trying to charge for 800-word opinion squibs. That's especially the case because there are network effects involved in writing of that sort: Part of the value of reading, say, Paul Krugman or Tom Friedman is that you expect other people to be reading them, and you want to be prepared for what folks are going to be chattering about over drinks after work (well, in D.C. anyway) or around the blogs. Attenuating that discussion by raising barriers to open linking could create a kind of negative feedback loop—and maybe grant Maureen Dowd the irrelevance she so richly deserves.