Is Spokesman-Review's 5-Year-Old 'Porous' Pay Wall the Future of Online?

Shaun Higgins, who directs digital operations at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane (WA) watches with bemusement as the newspaper industry tiptoes into experiments with limited pay walls. His paper has had a system in place for roughly five years that offers 90 percent of website content for free but fences off the other 10 percent for especially motivated audiences willing to pay. In essence it delivers the results the New York Times and others are aiming for in developing a so-called "metered model" -- but without the meter. What goes behind the pay wall is a group of local enterprise stories by Spokesman-Review reporters. Inbound clicks from search or aggregation sites bypass the wall.