While some of the sites had pay or registration barriers, others’ articles told readers to go buy the paper after paragraph two.

JP began testing the £5-a-quarter model in December on the Worksop Guardian; the Ripley & Heanor News; the Whitby Gazette; the Northumberland Gazette; Carrick Gazette and the Southern Reporter in Scotland “for us to understand directly the dynamics around consumer paid-for content”.

But the conclusion is clear - charging for local news online is something of a no-go. We don’t know how successful the registration or other elements of the trial were; Johnston is keeping results in-house.

Quoted on JP-owned Scotsman.com in November, CEO John Fry got swept up in Rupert Murdoch’s new bullishness: “Having examined JP’s traffic, the most valuable comes from loyal users. Those who come to JP from search engines tend to come from a sensationalist angle, and are therefore are not as valuable from an advertising point of view.”

In print, the six trial papers had ABC circulations between just 2,598 and 16,412, most of which were falling, before the experiment. Johnston did not improve the sites along with the pay trial, it merely sought to convert consumption behaviour with the existing proposition. In fact, Johnston now has 6.8 percent fewer group staff (438) and 12.2 percent less investment (£49.3 million) with which to keep up production.

According to its 2009 earnings report...

“As our content on local communities is often unique, we believe that we are well positioned to test whether users would be prepared to pay for their content delivered through local websites.

“The test is designed to help our understanding of the impact of our free digital offerings on print and whether customers are prepared to pay for news. It is our belief that the issue is not only the willingness of customers to pay for news content but also the ease of payment which particular mechanisms provide. No decision has been made to roll-out paywalls across our sites but we remain open to developments in this area.”

Larger, regional news sites may fare better than those in smaller towns, but the results will worry a troubled local news business that’s still left looking for survival strategies.