Like many of us, the brass at Philadelphia Media Network, Inc. — the new corporate entity (sometimes known here also as The Groovie Ghoulies) that controls the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News, and Philly.com — have wasted no time getting some of their goals for 2011 on the board. Chief among them, it would seem, is setting up new revenue streams for their media products and solidifying old ones. The Inky and DN let it slip today that at the end of this month, the newsstand price for both papers would go up to $1 for the Monday through Saturday editions. Now, Philebrity has learned from a credible source that PMN is, as we speak, hunkering down to build a plan for a pay wall for Philly.com, after years of internal and external debate over what would happen to Philly.com’s reach if the site were to go a paid-content route.

According to our source, yesterday, Publisher and CEO Greg Osberg addressed the pay wall issue in front of Philly.com staff, apparently made clear that it was PMN’s wish to build one, and gave the staff 24 hours to “figure it out” — that is, to devise a paywall plan and directives for its rollout, preferably sooner than later. At this time, it remains unknown whether or not a Philly.com pay wall would come in the form of a micro-payment system (wherein registered users get charged literally pennies per story they read) or a catch-all subscription rate.

Meanwhile, we’ve also learned that Philly.com is about to undergo yet another redesign — its third in as many years, we believe, and also, if we know Philly.com, probably also at great expense. And finally, we’ve learned details of a pending content partnership between Philly.com and City Paper that has been rumored for months (and which follows the departures of both longtime CP publisher Paul Curci and editor Brian Howard). The partnership agreement would essentially be a content swap, wherein multimedia content and stories from one source would also appear on the other’s site, though Philly.com content moving in City Paper‘s direction would, of course, not be behind a pay wall. As is the case with the pay wall, there’s no exact indication of when exactly the swap would begin other than “soon.”

UPDATE: Since we initially ran this post a few hours ago, we’ve heard from several corners of the Inky/DN/Philly.com staff with clarifications, though it must be said that some of these “clarifications” make matters even more cloudy, if not directly contradict one another. Taking them in summary, here is as best we can put it together what is going on with the Philly.com pay wall strategy: Philly.com will be pushing two pay products hard — both an Inquirer and Daily News in an “e-reader” format, which mimics the layouts of those papers. For instance, if you pull up Philly.com in your browser, and click on either of the two main tabs on top left, for the DN and Inky, respectively — which will currently take you to all of that day’s content in traditional website format — you’ll instead be taken to that day’s paper in an e-reader format, which you will then have to pay for. (This, of course, being an even worse, clumsier idea than a simple pay wall login, but at this point, who’s keeping track of bad ideas?)

Meanwhile, everyone we heard from insists that, for now, and even after the pay wall e-reader scheme launches, Inky and DN content posted on Philly.com will be free. But this ignores the obvious discretion that Inky/DN/Philly.com editors will have when it comes to deciding what to cross-post on Philly.com, and what to hide behind the pay wall of the e-readers. So in essence, what we’re hearing is that Philly.com is launching a pay wall that’s not a pay wall, unless they want to have it be a pay wall. To which we say: Good luck with that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 5th, 2011 at 5:19 pm.