The pied piper of paid?

They've finally ended it. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is now locking down its Web site for northwest Arkansas, www.nwanews.com.

"We think ultimately it is in the best interest of the company to not be giving our content up there away for free," Paul Smith, the D-G's general manager, said.

The D-G has famously asked for subscriptions to www.arkansasonline.com, its central Arkansas site. However, competition in the great northwest from The Morning News has kept online competition going in the region.

The possibility that readers are choosing to read the daily paper for free online rather than pay for the print edition caused Walter E. Hussman, the Democrat-Gazette's owner, to decide to switch to the paid format about six weeks ago, Smith said. The Morning News, owned by Stephens Media Group of Las Vegas, might gain a temporary advantage, but Hussman's Wehco Media could no longer afford the free-vs.-paid experiment with online content, Smith said.

"We finally came to the point where we felt we had to make a move," Smith said.

Large dailies have seen revenue, especially ad revenue, decline sharply since the economy began sputtering last year. The Democrat-Gazette has taken aggressive steps since the beginning of the year, trimming staff, mandating furloughs for editorial employees and raising subscription rates.

The Internet policy is not companywide, though. Wehco's Chattanooga Times Free Press in Tennessee will continue its free site, but even that paper dabbled with the idea of charging readers a couple years ago, Smith said. Chattanooga will remain a "test" site for the company, Smith said.

And while Hussman has long been a voice crying in the wilderness when advocating a paid online model, many other newspaper publishers are realizing that Internet revenue cannot support free content in the short term, Smith said.

The Morning-News has had little time to consider how the D-G's decision will impact its Web site, www.nwaonline.com.

"At this point, we are just sitting back and taking a look," Morning-News Publisher Tom Stallbaumer said.

However, the D-G's change might enable northwest Arkansas to become one of the nation's first markets in which competing papers move content behind a firewall.

Stallbaumer was noncommittal about whether a firewall might be in the paper's future. "We are not at that point right now," he said. The paper has experience with the practice, though. "We have helped a couple of our weekly papers put most of their content behind firewalls."