The trend toward paywalls is accelerating among print newspapers. Might this indicate an opportunity for local news startup ventures serving those communities?

This week E.W. Scripps Co. announced that next year it will roll out paywalls across all 13 of its newspaper markets. Scripps Senior VP Tim Stautberg told the Cincinnati Business Courier: "We'll start rolling out in the first part of 2013 across all of our markets, and certainly by the third and fourth quarter we'll be out with our products bundled in every one of our newspaper markets."

Also this week, the newspaper trade journal News & Tech updated its list of newspapers with existing or planned paywalls. So far this includes over 300 papers -- some in every state, plus several Canadian papers and some international ones.

As local paywalls go up -- especially when they first go up -- it's possible that cost-conscious local news consumers might become more interested in alternative free sources of local news and information.

Are the main newspapers in your area putting up a paywall? If so, that's an opportunity to step up your marketing and outreach campaigns to engage your community and grow your local audience. This also could be a good time to talk to local advertisers -- if they're concerned about about the potential impact of a paywall on the online audience for their newspaper ads, they might be more interested in diversifying their ad spend to include venues with a growing local audience.

The News for Digital Innovators blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.