Or birds.

I cancelled my newspaper subscriptions and used the money to buy puppy training pads. The crap on the pads is more tolerable than the crap "news" my local rag was publishing.

Or people are so broke they need the coupons...

Pay walls can work for ultra-local news for small towns and for extremely specialized news (timely stock market news for day traders for instance), but for only that.  Mainstrean state-wide, national, and international news have dozens of free alternatives.

Most pay walls are fairly leaky by design.  Most have a "x articles allowed per month" freebie, which means you can just delete your cookies to reset that.  Most also allow links referred from sites like Fark, Facebook, and Google, and most let you at least see the headline of the article before blocking it.  So, copy/paste the article into Google and click on the link and you get around the pay wall.

It's digital subscriptions, subby, not newspaper circulation.
They're not the same.

Why are subscription revenues rising?  Let's use Seattle as an example:
* daily newspaper was $0.25 when there was competition.  Now that the Post-Intelligencer is gone, it is $1, or four times as much.
* Sunday newspaper -- as well as other key days such as Thanksgiving -- the newspaper has gone from $0.50 to $2.

So, even as print runs continue to decline -- about 25% in the case of the Seattle Times -- revenues have increased.

I use the cloth diaper as the canary in the nostalgia mine-shaft. How are cloth diapers performing these days?

Many of these paywalls recently went up. The question is whether or not people will stick around after their first month.