The Miami Herald Media Co. - responsible for The Miami Herald - has stopped accepting volunteer donations to finance its online editorial content, according to The Miami Herald's website.

Last December, the Miami-based daily, experimented with an innovative way to finance its online operations by asking its online readers to donate if they "prefer the convenience of the Internet."

A move that worked for the collaborative online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, was reported to have been working well for The Miami Herald.

Back in January, executive editor for the Herald, Anders Gyllenhaal was optimistic about the donations. He explained in an article that the "first few days" of the strategy had elicited an encouraging stream of gifts, ranging from $2 to $55."

He also lauded the newspaper's initiative as the first effort of its kind.

"After evaluating two months of response, we've decided to end the program," Elissa Vanaver, vice president of the company that owns the Miami Herald said to its online edition.

No figures on how much money the newspaper raised with this initiative were given.

The newspaper publisher did not release any details regarding the reason why it discontinued the effort either. Early signs had showed it was working, but what could have prompted them to stop accepting donations?

There are a couple of possible explanations that come to mind - either the newspaper raised enough money to cover its operations and no longer needs to raise funds through donations, which seems unlikely after only a brief, two month-long campaign, or the early interest in the campaign weakened and only a limited amount of donations were made, which prompted organizers to end the venture. A third possible reason could be that the newspaper could be gearing up to finance its online operations through another initiative.

With newspapers suffering from dwindling advertising revenue, some have started charging for access to their news content.

The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times have been successful with their paywalls, and newspapers like The New York Times and Rupert Murdoch's Wapping newspapers will follow in their footsteps and erect their own paywalls soon.

With the sudden end of this short-lived innovative way to finance online content, will more newspapers simply flee to the paywall model to raise revenues?

Sources: The Miami Herald, The Huffington Post