San Jose's cat box liner is going down the paywall road

[KamaAina]

because it's worked so well for the NY Times, LA Times, and SF Chronicle, among others.

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24550468/bay-area-news-group-announces-new-digital-subscription

John Paton, CEO of Digital First Media, had been one of the leading holdouts to the trend toward paywalls but Tuesday said All Access is a tactic that will help the company now. Newspapers' subscription rates are expected to increase somewhat as the new model takes hold.

"We need more gas in the tank if we are going to complete this journey of print-to-digital transformation," he wrote in his blog....

Under the newspaper industry's traditional model, he said, the reader contributed 20 percent of the revenue and advertising 80 percent. Today, that model is about 30 percent reader and 70 percent advertising. The New York Times now gets 56 percent of its revenue from readers and only 44 percent from advertising and other sources, he said.

"So we're moving into this age of reader revenue, and this is part of the model. It doesn't mean that advertising is not important, but it's of lesser importance going forward. And it makes the connection between the journalist and the readers clearer."

Good thing there's seldom any news of national importance down here, apart from tech, which you can always get from Cnet or someplace.