The bomb dropped last night: my newspaper of employment, the Journal Star, will implement an online paywall starting April 4.

I’ve been involved in meetings about it for the past month, and we’ve been closely following the New York Times as they begin their own paywall tomorrow. Now it’s official. The chickens are restless, as expected, with most readers voicing some version of the following:

Readership will drop off like the Mariana Trench.

RIP Journal Star

I’ll take that $69.95 for a year over to the Casino and put it on three months before you either return to a free site or have to raise your rates even more to make up for the lack of ad revenue and visitors.

Perhaps if your advertising rates weren’t so ridiculous, you could afford to keep content free.

This is clearly and sadly the signal of the end of newspapers.

As a JS reader for 20+ years now, I can safely say this is the end of our relationship.

If the paper wasn’tt mired in such a far left bias I might consider it.

If this gets rid of the trolls on here who will now no longer be able to afford******ing on here because they have no job and just****** here all day,,,,,,then Ill pay double what youre asking.

Good luck PJS…I promise I will NOT pay.

Boy, talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. Fine job PJS, fine job indeed.

Not worth my milk money.

I think you get the picture. Managing editor John Plevka has already replied to some of the criticism in a blog post.

So do I personally believe in paying for news on the Internet? I’m going to cautiously say “yes.” Reporting is time-consuming, costly work; why pretend that it isn’t? Critics of this move will cite lost pageviews and further decline of online ad rates. But these numbers don’t fully tell the truth about your audience. This mass of anonymous readership isn’t local, and they will never again return to your website. These ad views by “randoms” are lost advertising dollars. But a reader that returns 6 times a day should command higher ad rates, even if overall pageviews are down. This is a captive, interested reader. And he’s likely looking for the local news he or she can’t get elsewhere in such depth. There was a recent article on the decline of SEO (search engine optimization) that basically agrees with this premise. And besides, those casual users coming from Google are still in the clear – we won’t start metering them until they’ve read their 15th story in a month.

There has admittedly been much newsroom grumbling about the amount of effort we put into our free website. Some editors have complained about putting valuable bodies to work on a product that, quite frankly, hurts our bottom line. And they’re honestly right. Starting in April, pjstar.com is no longer a freeloading enemy of our print product, but instead a complementary business model. It’s been proven again and again that people have a different psychological response toward a free product. You expect very little from it and, in turn, you value it less. This applies internally, too.

Some are already plotting their ways around the paywall at the NYT. And of course it’s porous, a javascript method easily disabled by those who care to give it a try. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger said in Australia’s The Age that he isn’t worried: “It’ll be mostly high school kids and people out of work,” he said, before adding “I can’t believe I said that.” Oops.

I’d add readers aged 20-35 to that list of people unaccustomed to paying for information. That worries me, too, since these are the readers we so desperately need to attract. This dispatch from SXSW confirms my fear.

I fully admit that this is a risky gambit. It’s rocking a boat that was launched 16 years ago, one that readers have made a part of their daily lives. But if there was ever a time to experiment, this is it. As Henry Ford put it, “Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.”

And so the debate continues. Former New York Times online dudes worry. And so do the media pundits. But I haven’t been this excited about the newspaper business in a long time.

$6.95 a month or $69.95 a year. Would you subscribe?