The Death of Local Newspapers and Local Newspaper Websites - Would you pay?

Regional publisher Johnston Press is about to put up paywalls around some of its weekly newspaper websites.

According to a report on HoldtheFrontPage, JP will begin the rolling-out the paid-for model across the company from Monday.

The subscription system will be the same as that currently used by the Scotsman to view "premium content" on its website, the report said.

It is understood that once the system is in place, users will be unable to view content beyond the homepage without subscribing for £5 for a three month period.

Rupert Murdoch recently announced that his plans to introduce paywalls around News Corp's sites by Next June could be delayed.

He said the company was behind schedule to introduce a paid-model by the end of News Corporation's financial year. "I wouldn't promise that we're going to meet that date," he said.

There has been a drastic shortfall in advertising money flowing into local press this past 18 months as many of it's classified advertisers from cars, goods and property book online space in other targeted media. The local papers were late to see the need for local websites and now they put up further barriers to advertisers in the form of locking out users. Amazing!

What they should have done was give advertisers and their agencies free online space with their print commercial spend and then those spending the money would have stats to work out the value of the newspapers' online offering and be able to migrate press spend onto their local sites and the papers not lose it to other digital competitors.

The paywall is madness. Users expect information for free, they will find it too, because there will always be someone out there providing it, never mind whether they are big or small.

Would you pay for your local newspaper online when you don't even pay for it in its print form? No.

Mind you it's good news for sites like this one :-) Where else will you find out local news, events and info? Public journalism is alive and well on BeckenhamTown.us.