MediaNews Set To Launch Pay Walls Next Year

MediaNews Group, one of the largest newspaper companies in the U.S., has decided to launch pay walls on Web sites of two of its papers early next year.

The pay walls will first go into effect for the The Enterprise-Record in Chico, Calif. and The York Daily Record in Pennsylvania, and then may be extended to other MediaNews newspaper properties, Editor & Publisher reports.

“We wanted to get sites that were not metro sites for the same reason that you don’t open on Broadway,” Howard Saltz, MediaNews’ vice president for content development, told E&P. “But not a site that has Web traffic so small that the change would not affect anything.” However, what these papers will put behind a pay wall and when exactly we can expect to see them rolled out has yet to be decided.

The decision to launch the pay walls comes six months after MediaNews outlined its new interactive strategy in a May memo, paving the way for online paid content. We’ll be keeping an eye on how this latest pay wall plan works out for this paper publisher, and keep you updated on any developments. This probably won’t be the last we’ll be hearing about publishers unveiling pay wall plans in the next few months.

MediaNews To Launch Partial Pay Walls At Two Newspaper Sites –Editor & Publisher

Related: Poll: Will Paywalls Save Newspapers?

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