Guardian boss Carolyn McCall has echoed other execs at the paper in ruling out a move to paid content, but said that it could charge for “specialist content”.

In an interview with the Financial Times, the Guardian Media Group chief executive said that while her position was not set in stone she saw no commercial evidence that pay walls generate returns.

“It is the wrong thing to do right now because the jury is out about whether that is the way consumers are going to get information. We will watch what happens,” she said.

It’s an interesting choice of words the “watch what happens” pointing to the internal debate the paper has had about pay walls. Clearly this has been a hot topic in The Guardian boardroom and while I know they have all come out against it you get the impression that some were more against charging more than others.

For the Guardian with its rising traffic (new record of 38 million unique users for December reported on Friday) it looks like the way to go. Less so if you are the Times Online and traffic is falling (ABCe’s spell bad news for Times and good new for Guardian.co.uk).

McCall added that the Guardian, like the New York Times, had looked at six different pay models including a complete a complete “pay wall”. She said that introducing pay barriers would restrict the Guardian’s journalism.

Last week editor Alan Rushbridger in the Hugh Cudlipp lecture expressed his preference for the Guardian to remain without a pay wall and to build on its £25m strong advertising revenues.

Interestingly, it took the New York Times a good while to reach any conclusion before it told the waiting world that it was going ahead with a metered plan in 2011. And all the reports suggest that debate was fierce on the issue within those Manhattan media corridors with dissenting views not in short supply.

While McCall ruled out a pay wall she hinted that there were areas of content Guardian.co.uk could charge for:

“That is not to say there are not areas of specialist content that cannot be charged for,” she said.

This could point to any number of things. The Guardian membership club that has been written about could be one such area of specialist content that people pay for. Guess we’ll see.

Also in the piece McCall talked about jobs. With its “higher levels of permanent staffing than other UK national newspapers” Guardian News & Media has cut 150 jobs across editorial and commercial with 100 jobs going this year.

She said Guardian News & Media had got its cost base down to where it wants and said it was not planning more cuts but would not rule them out.

“You can never say never in the current economic environment,” she said.

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