Retweet: Sonoma Index-Tribune drops website paywall after Patch launches its own Sonoma news site

A nice catch from Jim Romenesko concerning a local wine country newspaper's reaction to new competition (I'm not a fan of Poynter's redesign, though.)

The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, Calif.) is reporting that the local twice-weekly Sonoma newspaper, the Index-Tribune, has dropped its paywall for their news site Sonoma News. The paper had created the paywall charging $5 per month for news access, only three months prior.

The lifting of the paywall comes as the AOL-backed Patch has launched its own news site for Sonoma. (Did anyone tell AOl that the population of Sonoma was 9,128 in the last census?)