Southern Maryland Newspapers
The Washington Post Comapny's Southern Maryland Newspapers -- which include the Maryland Independent, The (St. Mary's County) Enterprise and The Calvert Recorder -- will launch a paywall June 17. An article published Friday tells current subscribers they'll see no change other than a request they register on somdnews.com.

Others will be able to view three stories a month before hitting the gate. Breaking news will still be free, "in keeping with the responsibility we have to inform the communities we serve when something happens," the article says, as will classified and legal ads.

A one-year subscription to the Independent or The Enterprise costs $44 (plus you get a $20 gas card); 12 months of the Recorder costs $29 (you get a $10 gas card). Post Co. spokesperson Rima Calderon says via email no other Post Co.-owned community papers are installing paywalls at this time, and that digital-only packages will be available. The Washington Post Co. shuttered two of its Maryland papers last month. (more...)

Gazette.Net | The Frederick News-Post
The Washington Post Co. announced Wednesday it would stop publishing the Frederick County, Md., editions of its Gazette newspapers. Post-Newsweek Media CEO Karen Acton said the move "became necessary due to changes in the market conditions in Frederick,” a county about 40 miles northwest of Washington, D.C.

Wednesday's editions of the Frederick papers were their last, and 18 full-time employees and 12 part-time employees lost their jobs, Post Co. spokesperson Rima Calderon told Cara R. Anthony of the Frederick News-Post. Post-Newsweek Media still prints Gazette papers in Montgomery and Prince George's Counties in Maryland, as well as the weekly Fairfax County Times in Virginia and newspapers in Southern Maryland. (more...)

Jacob Weisberg reacted so swiftly to Forbes reporter Jeff Bercovici's suggestion Friday that Slate might put in some sort of pay model because "the confusion about paywalls is bad for sites like ours," the Slate Group chairman said when reached by phone Monday.

Slate had a hard time shedding its rep as a pay site for years after experimenting with a paywall in 1998, Weisberg said. "It took some years for people to stop being confused about it," adding that Salon's "Premium" model a few years later also confused readers "because our names are so similar." (more...)

Talk about a dying industry. The Washington Post Co. risked becoming the punch line of an obvious joke this morning with the announcement that it has acquired a majority stake in a hospice company.

Hospice? Not as strange as it sounds if you know the company’s ways. It has a particular fondness for “a long-term investment horizon,” as Chairman Donald Graham said in a press release. Not knowing the particular competitive advantage of the company (Celtic Healthcare), my hunch is that Graham figured that people his age and mine are going to need hospice care. Later rather than sooner, we may hope, but the huge baby boomer cohort has rounded the corner to senior citizen status. And it is a fair bet that the government and insurers will cover hospice care since it is so much less expensive than an extended end-of-life hospital stay.

There is precedent. Kaplan Educational Services was small when the Post bought it in 1984 and grew slowly for 15 years or so before it took off to become the company’s largest division.

The Washington Post
The Washington Post Co.'s SocialCode social media advertising agency is hiring 15 members of Digg's engineering staff, the company announced today. The company is not acquiring any of Digg's technology, and the site is not closing, writes Hayley Tsukayama:

But members of Digg’s leadership team will be taking lead roles at SocialCode. Alan Lippman, who had been the social reader’s vice president of advertising products, will be the chief scientist at SocialCode. Will Larson, a software developer at Digg, will serve as Social Code’s director of engineering. SocialCode said that the developers will work on social marketing solutions.

SocialCode's CEO is Laura O’Shaughnessy, daughter of Washington Post Co. chairman Don Graham (who also serves on Facebook's board of directors).

"We’re proud to share that the Digg engineering team will be joining SocialCode," wrote Digg CEO Matt Williams, who is not part of the move. "Joining SocialCode felt like a natural next step."

Peter Kafka reported at the end of April that this move was imminent. As for what happens to the rest of Digg, Kafka wrote then, "given the fact that Digg has been looking for a buyer for months, it’s hard to see how they’ll be able to find another home for the remainder of the company." (more...)

All Things D
In a video interview, Washington Post Co. chairman Don Graham (who's also a member of Facebook's board of directors) talks with Kara Swisher about the Post's new Facebook app and the future of news. "The key issue [for newspapers] is very simple: We need to learn. We need to do experiments like this," Graham says of the Washington Post Social Reader app, which enables users to share their news reading activity with friends. The Facebook app is especially aimed at "younger readers" in their 20s who are "the great mystery," Graham says. "They are interested in news … but they don't want it in an old-fashioned print format as I do." He says social reading isn't the future of newspapers, "but it is a part of that future." || Related: With ‘frictionless sharing,’ Facebook and news orgs push boundaries of online privacy

Washington Post release
Washington Post Co. posted net income of $45.6 million, compared with net income of $91.9 million a year earlier. The newspaper division reported a $2.9 million operating loss, compared to a loss of $14.3 million in last year's second quarter. Revenue was down at the education division, while revenues were up at the television broadcasting and cable television divisions.
* The Kaplan division reported second quarter 2011 operating income of $20.5 million, down from $112.4 million in the second quarter of 2010.
* For the first six months of 2011, Washington Post daily and Sunday circulation declined 4.5 percent and 4.1 percent, respectively, compared to the same periods of the prior year. || Earnings Cheat Sheet: Washington Post Co. bad luck continues.