Can The Washington Post’s national push help support local news?

When The Washington Post announced in mid-March that it would provide free digital access to subscribers of a half-dozen local papers around the country, the consensus take was clear: After years of hesitation, the Post, under Jeff Bezos, was finally looking to “go national” in a big way.

Under the arrangement, subscribers of six papers -- The Dallas Morning News, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Honolulu Star-Advertiser, and The Blade of Toledo (OH) -- will get digital-subscriber access to the Post’s website and apps once the pilot program launches in May. The local papers get an extra benefit to offer subscribers; the Post gets greater national reach, a local marketing boost, and a chance to build relationships with people who are already devoted news readers. No money changes hands. The offer is “intended for print subscribers [of local papers] only -- not for digital,” Steve Hills, the Post’s president and general manager, said.

For the Post, the new program is “a bigger bet” on the paper’s ability to attract a larger, engaged national audience while it also remains focused on its local market, said Hills. And while the arrangement will presumably make it a bit harder for the paper to sell web subscriptions in, say, Dallas or Minneapolis, he said the program can co-exist with the Post’s efforts to build its own digital subscriber base. “We think it’s a great fit for the industry, because so many papers have decided the key differentiation they have is local,” he added. From the Post’s perspective, a side benefit of the deal is that it adds another incentive to subscribe to local papers, he added.