Thanks to some financial assistance from The Knight Foundation and the technical transom of MagCloud, Voice of San Diego is heading in a very non-traditional digital media direction. The respected regional news source is adding a monthly print magazine.

Free to paying members as a perk and available for purchase to non-members, Voice of San Diego Monthly comes on the heels of the LA Times’ decision to shutter their Sunday magazine. Perhaps the paper can take a page from VoSD and consider re-upping the insert as a similar paywall subscriber benefit. From today’s Knight Foundation blog post by VoSD editor Scott Lewis:

When I discovered MagCloud, I got an idea and couldn’t shake it. Rather than let our stories sit on some virtual shelf, why not offer the chance for people to catch up? We floated the idea to Knight Foundation, which loved it and decided to help with the experiment by funding it.

Here’s how it works. We design and upload the magazine. If you decide to buy it, either the digital or print version, MagCloud takes a cut and sends the difference to us.

At the same time, we built the magazine into the benefits of our Raise Your Voice membership program for those who join our community at the Speaking Up level. If we can generate enough support for it, through sponsors who want to put messages in it, people who buy individual copies and members excited to have it, then we can keep uploading new editions.

For non-members, the MagCloudprice tag for the magazine is either $7.99 for a print edition or $2.99 for a digital PDF version. An interesting experiment FishbowlLA will be closely watching.