Papers Put Faith in Paywalls

WSJ reporting:
As more newspapers close the door on free access to their websites, some publishers are still waiting for paying customers to pour in.
The numbers of readers signing up so far suggest that at many papers, "paywalls" aren't about to reverse publishers' deteriorating finances. Yet the results aren't discouraging industry executives, who say their efforts are succeeding in shoring up the core print business after years of declines.

The New York Times' flagship paper has had a paywall for a year.

Tribune Co.'s Los Angeles Times as of Monday will begin charging for full online access. Publisher Gannett Co. also said it will join the ranks. Including them, about 10 major U.S. papers and several hundred smaller papers in the past year have said they are now or will soon limit full online access to subscribers who pay either for the print edition or for digital.
So far, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis has attracted 14,000 digital subscribers—equivalent to about 5.7% of its existing weekday print subscribers—since it started charging readers for its website in November. The Boston Globe has sold about 16,000 digital subscriptions, which include those for mobile devices, in the three months after it launched a paid website last fall, compared with its daily print circulation of about 200,000. Meanwhile, Newsday in New York had fewer than 1,000 paying digital subscribers two years after erecting an online paywall.
The industry has little choice but to keep trying. Over the past decade or so, with newspapers' content available free online, their finances have been devastated. Newspapers saw weekday circulation drop by nearly 10 million from 1999 to 2009, about 17% of the total, according to the Editor & Publisher International Yearbook. Print advertising revenue was cut almost in half in that period, according to the Newspaper Association of America.
The rate of decline has slowed recently, but online advertising revenue isn't growing nearly fast enough to make up for the erosion of print.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203833004577251822631536422.html?mod=dist_smartbrief