MediaNews Group has decided to cease printing Monday editions of some of its papers and, in compensation, the papers will drop their pay walls for twenty four hours.

Three California papers, the Times-Standard, The Reporter and The Times-Herald will cease printing and will try this intermittent pay-wall strategy, while the Oakland Tribune, The Argus and Daily Review will not be delivered to subscribers on a Monday but will be available for sale. Times-Standard print subscribers will no longer have to pay any additional cost for their online readership, as of January 9th.

MediaNews recently came under the leadership of John Paton and Digital First Media, along with the Journal Register Company. The decision to stop printing for a day is clearly a money-saving measure in a company that plans to put more emphasis on digital, and the dropping of the paywall could have interesting consequences.

The pay-wall has been one of the industry's answers to monetising online content, and certain examples have been fairly successful - take The New York Times for instance - but their model is less of a wall and more like a low hedge, in that it can easily be surmounted thanks to a social media referral. In the case of the arrival of hurricane Irene on the American east coast, the NYT dropped its pay-wall altogether as a matter of public interest.

A move like that doesn't just benefit the public however, it also benefits the paper: when pay-walls are dropped, the public can see into the walled garden and get a taste of what they are missing. When the pay-wall surrounding The Times of London had a technical failure today, there were speculations on Twitter that the 'failure' may have been deliberate, or that at the very least Times staff weren't exactly scrabbling frantically to get it back up and operational once more. Tom Whitwell, Editorial Director of Times Digital, denied this, stating that the pay wall was down because "Readers had trouble logging in. While that's being fixed, the site fails open so subscribers aren't inconvenienced". He also argued that the site has no need of "free eyeballs" because "100k paying subscribers = success".

It's too early to tell if the intermittent pay-wall is the miraculous solution everyone has been looking for, but there is something to be said for the try-before-you-buy approach to pay-walls. It seems that the 'leaky' system works for the NYT, so perhaps an intermittent approach could be equally as viable.

Sources: Forbes, The Guardian, Times-Standard, Twitter: Tom Whitwell,