Newsday will charge $5 a week for non-subscribers to access its Web site, starting next week.
The fee is roughly equivalent to the charge for home delivery of the paper.
Customers who already subscribe to Newsday or the Optimum Online service, also owned by parent company Cablevision, will get access for free. According to Newsday, that covers about 75 percent of households on Long Island.
Non-subscribers won’t be completely blocked. They will have access to the homepage and can read certain major stories for free, and have unlimited access to content like weather, school closings an obituaries for free.
Debby Krenek, managing editor of Newsday, said she would not be surprised to see a drop in unique visitors when it initially goes behind a partial pay wall.
“What we are focusing on is the more engaged reader who will spend more time on the site,” she said.