The Madera Tribune has picked up a UC ANR press release on Pacific fishers, small carnivores being tracked in the Sierra Nevada by UC wildlife biologist Rick Sweitzer. The Tribune posted a four-paragraph "teaser" on its Web site. Unlike most news media, the full story is only available by paid subscription. (The online subscription cost ranges from $12.95 for one month to $66.95 for a year.)

Also unusual, Tribune reporter Ramona Frances edited out the connection to UC. Sweitzer is named a "biologist assigned to Madera County" in the teaser. Attribution to UC may be included in the long, published version, which I am awaiting via postal mail.

This media pick up has piqued my curiosity about pay-per-view news articles. It seems the larger publications have abandoned paid subscriptions. An example is the New York Times, which dropped online paid subscriptions a year ago September because readers were arriving from search engines, rather than starting at the Times' main page, and then were frustrated by being blocked from reading the whole story. However, according to a story on Circman.com, smaller, hometown newspapers like the Tribune are still asking their readers to pay cash for content. Local content isn't readily available from competitors, so local papers have an exclusive commodity that still commands a price.