Online access to the New York Daily News will no longer be free. Effective February 1, Daily News is putting up a metered paywall. Print subscribers will get free digital access to Daily News. Everyone else can access up to 10 free articles per month before being required to pay to access additional content. To start, Daily News will offer digital subscriptions for $0.99 for 13 weeks. Then the subscription rate goes up to $1.99 a week, billed every four weeks, with no long-term commitment. Other offers will also be available.

In the January 24 announcement, Daily News staff said that not all content would require a subscription. The Daily News’ homepage will be free, along with the front of the news, sports and entertainment sections of the paper. They also said access to their Careers, FAQs and Contact Us pages is free. The metered paywall is the first major change coming out of Daily News, which was acquired by Tronc Inc. in September.

‘As always, content provided under the new model will feature some of the best journalism in the business. Enjoy!’ said staff in the announcement.

Daily News is among a handful of publications starting off the year with a metered paywall. In January, the Denver Post announced it was putting up a metered paywall. Readers would have to pay $11.99 a month to access more than a handful of articles. At the time of the announcement, the newspaper did not specify how many articles a reader could access before hitting the paywall.

In November, the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Wired magazine, who is owned by Conde Nast, is going to put up a paywall in January. We visited the site and accessed 12 stories and were not asked to subscribe, so it isn’t clear if the paywall is up yet. In his interview with the Journal, Wired editor-in-chief Nicholas Thompson said the cost would be less than $9.99 a month, but the Wired website only shows a print-and-digital subscription option.

‘The simple reason that we’re going to a paywall model is that I think it’s going to make money, and I’d like us to make more money,’ said Thompson in his interview with the Journal. ‘The deeper reason we’re going to a paywall model is because you need to hedge against the future.’

According to the Journal article, executives at Conde Nast said paywalls may follow at its other magazines.

In a separate article, the Journal reported that The Atlantic is putting up a metered paywall in January. Readers could access up to 10 articles for free per month before being asked to subscribe. The Atlantic previously had a paywall about 10 years ago, and last spring, it started requiring readers using ad blockers to turn off their ad blockers, whitelist the site, or pay $3.99 per month, or $39.99 per year, to get an ad-free experience on the site.

In November, Business Insider said it would be launching a new subscription product. The new product, called BI Prime, will offer some of its financial reporting behind a paywall. It is a freemium model with much of Business Insider’s content in front of the paywall, but exclusive financial reporting behind the paywall.

Insider Take:

The trend toward a metered paywall seems to be growing as more newspapers and magazines fight declining revenue with new revenue streams like subscriptions. Some like the Denver Post have held out for a long time, while others like The Atlantic have experimented with different versions of a paywall before coming to the reality that a paywall is almost a necessity in this day in age.

While the ‘new’ paywall models all have similarities, we find the various rollouts interesting. Some make a big announcement on their websites with the editor-in-chief or publisher explaining the reason for the big change and asking readers to pay for quality journalism, while other publications are, ironically, outed by the media before their subscription plans have been fully tested, defined or announced.