The Center of Public Integrity is to adopt a new strategy that will aim to match donations with earned income in the hope of finding a more sustainable path for nonprofit journalism, reported Politico. The Center's website will seek to become a high-traffic destination and generate revenue through advertising and membership.

Earlier this month, the Center for Public Integrity announced that it was merging with the nonprofit Huffington Post Investigative Fund, a move that involved six Huff Po reporters moving over to the Center.

According to Politico, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund has agreed to give all its assets to the Center in exchange for the Huffington Post running up to three of the Center's stories each day.

Bill Buzenburg, CPI's executive director said "the merge inspired the Center to reach further and raise more revenue in order to take advantage of a void in the marketplace to do more of this narrow and deep investigative reporting."

But is there such a big void? Roy Greenslade in the UK's Evening Standard argues that although some "publications have tightened their belts too much to employ the luxury of investigative reporters, investigative journalism is still very much alive and kicking."

Although no official numbers have been released by Times and Sunday Times owner News International, audience research company Nielsen has estimated that an average of 362,000 UK web users went behind the papers' paywalls between July and September, reported the Guardian.

Nielsen estimates that 1.78 million monthly unique visitors from the UK went to the two papers' homepages, meaning that of these, just over one-fifth are going on to access subscription content, the Guardian added. In the three months until June 2010, the traffic to the Times Online site, predecessor to TheTimes.co.uk and SundayTimes.co.uk, was just over 3 million.

Print subscribers for the Times and Sunday Times have free access to the websites: the Times has 107,000 subscribers and the Sunday Times 112,000, the Guardian noted. So it is unclear how many people are paying for an online subscription only.

The numbers do suggest, however, that traffic going through to individual stories has fallen by just over 88% since the paywall was implemented. This is in line with previous reports of News International's expectations.

Politico plans to launch a subscription news service on what Congress, federal agencies and trade associations are doing concerning health care, energy and technology, reported the New York Times. Politico Pro will launch early next year and will cost $1,495 to $2,500 for the first topic and $1000 for each subsequent one, the NYT said.

The new service will involve hiring 50 people, 40 of them journalists.

The Washington DC-based political news site saw an opening in a market which executive editor Jim VandeHei believes is wrongly perceived as overserved, according to the NYT. The target audience would presumably be lobbyists and government offices, similar, the NYT noted, to publications like Congressional Quarterly and National Journal.

The hope is that Politico Pro will provide another significant source of revenue for Politico, which makes a good deal of its income from advertising in its print edition: available free in locations around Capitol Hill and Washington DC. Politico's owner Allbritton Communications started a local news site in Washington this summer, TBD.com.

UK publisher Trinity Mirror announced that it is finalising plans for its upcoming paywalls on mirror.co.uk (The Daily Mirror) and sundaymirror.co.uk (The Sunday Mirror), Brand Republic reported today. According to Marketing, the concluded plans will be available by the end of the year.

"Our view is that people will not pay for ubiquitous content that is free elsewhere. But there may be a willingness to pay for unique, high-value content," said Mark Hollinshead, the managing director for the group's nationals, Brand Republic reported.

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