Wall Street Journal: What happens when one of the country’s best-known culture magazines asks readers to pay more? The New Yorker, owned by Conde Nast, has been testing the boundaries of readers’ willingness to pay more as the slump in print ad pages deepens. The initial risk when the weekly built a metered paywall in 2014 was that web traffic would falter. Instead, the number of unique visitors rose to 9.7 million in October 2015 from 5.5 million a year earlier.