MediaNews Group to adopt metered paywalls

Posted by Elizabeth Redman on February 8, 2010 at 4:48 PM

The MediaNews Group has released details of its plans to charge for content online, announced in November last year, Bloomberg reports. The publisher will adopt a metered system similar to that planned at The New York Times.

Two newspapers, the Daily Record in York, Pennsylvania, and the Enterprise-Record in Chico, California, will start charging in May. They will give users access to up to 25 'premium' articles a month, after which they will be required to pay a fee. Print subscriptions will include access to the website. Premium content may include some columns and investigative reporting, MediaNews president Joseph Lodovic said.

"Most of our content will remain free," he told Bloomberg. "Once subscribed, the reader will have access to all premium across MediaNews Group."

The group, which filed for bankruptcy just a few weeks ago, may expand the paywall to more of its 54 US dailies.

This resembles the plans for a metered paywall announced by The New York Times, which will allow users to access a certain number of articles for free each month and then request a flat fee for unlimited access to the rest of the site.

MediaNews will use Journalism Online LLC, a start-up which facilitates payments for online news for over 1300 publishers, to process the payments for its sites. This will enable the group to establish the paywall faster than if it were to build its own service, as the Times is doing, Paid Content points out.

The debate over whether to charge for online content continues, with proponents including media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who plans to set up paywalls around News Corp's news websites, and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who has committed to keeping guardian.co.uk free. German publisher Axel Springer has just put up paywalls for two of its newspapers. MediaNews is a particularly interesting case because of the bankruptcy, and when it starts to charge, those in the industry will be watching.

Sources: Bloomberg, Paid Content, The New York Times