MediaNews Group announced yesterday that it will be placing pay walls on two of its newspaper sites by early 2010. They will be partial pay walls because, according to MediaNews Group CEO and vice-chair, William Dean Singleton, "we don't think putting everything behind a pay wall works, but we think putting some things behind a pay wall works... We have to condition readers that everything is not free." The decision as to what will remain free and what will be paid for has not yet been made, according to Howard Saltz, vice president for content development.

The two papers that will be receiving the pay walls are the Enterprise-Record in Chico, California, and the York Daily Record of York County, Pennsylvania. These two newspapers were chosen as test sites for MediaNews following a meeting in April regarding different Internet issues. If the test runs proves successful, there are talks to place pay walls on more of the company's newspapers in the future.

The California and Pennsylvania sites were chosen for their middle of the road size and traffic rates. This was to ensure there was enough internet traffic to begin with that a change in usage would be noticed as well as to avoid a large metropolitan area where it would be impossible to recover from a failed experiment.

This announcement comes just after the release of a study by Balderton Capital that found that a newspaper could make more money off subscriptions than advertisers if its could get just 3-4% of its current readers to subscribe. Pay walls, however, remain controversial, so demonstrated by the Newsday reporter who quit earlier this week after the decision was made to place his work behind a pay wall.

Source: Editor & Publisher