The Denver Post is the latest newspaper to put up a paywall. Effective yesterday, readers must pay $11.99 a month to get online access to more than a handful of stories, reports the Denver Business Journal. The Post has not yet specified the number of stories in its per-month threshold. In the past, The Post only charged a subscription fee for the print version of the paper. Some content will remain free like the site’s marijuana-related sister site, The Cannabist, and its entertainment site, The Know.

The change occurs as the majority of the newsroom moves out of its pricey downtown offices in favor of its printing facility at 5990 Washington Street in nearby Adams County. The Post’s parent company Digital First Media will stay in the top floor at 101 W. Colfax in downtown Denver. Others including the editorial board, city hall reporter, politics team and Denver-centric reporters will work out of an office building next door. Chuck Plunkett, editorial-pages-editor, said they aren’t eager to leave their current offices, but it is a financial necessity.

‘So, yes, it is a sad time for us, another insult after years of downsizing,’ Plunkett wrote in a January 12 column.

He also announced the newspaper would no longer be free.

‘Starting Monday, we’re all done giving our content away. Those who read us online will have to pay,’ Plunkett said. ‘Time to put a ring on it.’

Plunkett said they have been testing the paywall, alerting ad blocker users that they need to shut down their ad blocker or buy a digital subscription. Print subscribers will receive access to the Denver Post online without paying an additional cost.

‘For those who don’t have any kind of subscription already, the cost will be $11.99 a month, which is way, way, way less than you’d pay to support even the mildest of coffee habits,’ Plunkett wrote. ‘It takes a lot of money to run a newsroom. If you read a lot of news, the quality of that news depends upon your support. It ought to be a given: a condition of the social contract.’

Plunkett cited a number of reasons for the newspaper’s financial decline over the years which have led to layoffs, cutbacks and cost-saving measures. He said the advertising revenue loss was significant, and he referred to Google and Facebook as ‘behemoths’ who are taking more than the lion’s share of digital ad dollars.

‘How I have hated the enormous amount of time we’ve spent trying to get page views in the empty belief the digital ads would save us. In that pursuit we’ve drained precious time and resources that could have been focused on doing even more real journalism, like fact-checking political claims, investigating government spending or crafting a better read,’ Plunkett said. ‘Returning to our fundamentals will be better for readers and journalists alike.’

As the Columbia Journalism Review pointed out last fall in ‘In Paywall Age, Free content Remains King for Newspaper Sites,’ there is no consensus among newspapers as to the right business model. What works for one does not necessarily work for another. For example, the Wall Street Journal has a hard paywall with very few leaks, while The New York Times offers 10 free articles before a reader must subscribe.

In an interview with CJR, Mark Campbell, Tronc’s senior vice president for digital marketing, said that the metered paywall is seen as a best practice in the industry, but how many articles are available for free varies widely across publications. This fall Google’s announced the end of its ‘First Click Free’ policy, which gives publications more flexibility with how many free articles they offer while still receiving favorable search engine traffic from Google.

Insider Take:

Though the shift to digital publishing has been going on for years, newspapers like The Denver Post are still trying to figure it out. Like The Post, many are downsizing staff and moving out of iconic headquarters that are too large or too expensive for their current needs. At the same time, they are trying to make up for lost print advertising revenue – and digital ad revenue is not making up for it, especially as the Googles and Facebooks of the world dominate the online ad world.

Despite their importance to the democratic process, many newspapers are continuing to struggle. Some will figure it out soon enough to save their papers, while others are likely to be acquired by larger entities eager to grow their empires at a bargain price. We hope that other newspapers will follow The Post’s example and recognize that they deserve to be paid fairly for their work. We also hope that consumers recognize that quality journalism is expensive, and that supporting it with a subscription – or choosing not to – can literally make or break a local newspaper.