WashingtonPost.com will now offer articles for free for 60 days, instead of the previous 14, before putting them behind the paid for subscription wall. The objective of the initiative is to increase traffic and advertising revenues.

It is also, according to Clickz News, "an acknowledgement of the role of blogs, search and RSS, which have all worked to keep news stories in the public eye for longer periods of time."

In this context, Jim Brady, executive editor of WashingtonPost.com, uses the example of the story the paper broke about secret CIA prisons in foreign countries; the story "continued to generate links and buzz for weeks after its debut … For us to take that article offline after 14 days really does us a disservice."

Blog and search links send internet users directly to individual articles, this illustrates how important it is for users to be able to access such stories. Brady has acknowledged that approximately half the traffic at WashingtonPost.com now comes to the site this way.

Brady has the extension of availability of free content is an experiment: "We wanted to see how much more traffic we could drive and compare that to what we were making via the archives [subscriptions]."

Source: Clickz News