The Los Angeles Times is to become the latest major online newspaper to put up a paywall. It announced its plans at the weekend and says it will begin charging from next week.

Like the unrelated New York Times, the LA Times has opted for a social media friendly metered paywall and plans to charge an initial rate of 99 cents a month before rising after a four week trial.

Those LA Times readers choosing not to subscribe will be able to read 15 stories in a 30-day period for free and there will be no charge for subscribers of the printed newspaper.

The LA Times, joins the Wall Street Journal, the Dallas Morning News and soon 80 of USA Today-owner Gannett’s community newspapers, which will be putting up paywalls this year. That was a move announced by Gannett last week. The publisher believes it could boost earnings by $100m in 2013.

After the 99 cents for the first four weeks, the rate will rise to $1.99 a week in a package that also includes the Sunday newspaper. Digital-only access will cost $3.99 a week.

Kathy Thomson, president and chief operating officer of Los Angeles Times Media Group, said that the Times priced the digital subscription with the Sunday newspaper at a lower rate because they are complementary products.

The daily paper has seen its circulation slide by 200,000 in the last five years to an average paid daily circulation of about 575,000 for the six months to September 2011. The Sunday circulation has fallen by about 265,000 to just over 900,000. Its website was the third most viewed in the US last year, after the NY Times and the Washington Post, and averages 17 million monthly unique users.

What the LA Times won’t be doing is calling its paywall a paywall, rather it will be referring to it as “membership program”, which will also offer retail discounts, deals and giveaways — as well as access to news.

Interestingly back in the UK last week, Tom Whitwell, editorial director of Times Digital, hinted that the Times, which has a closed anti-social media paywall, was looking how it uses and works with social media and a change could be in the offiing.

Currently no content on The Times website is accessible without a subscription. Although the paper took the unusual, but well worth while, step of last week putting content outside of its paywall as it opened up the final report from Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin who was killed on Wednesday.

“Working how we let people read articles that people have shared will be a significant improvement of what we are doing. Paid journalism can still go viral,” said Whitwell.

Whitwell explained, adding that it’s not that paywalled articles that will be spread via social media, but that having a paid content system “has not stopped” the potentially viral nature of Facebook and Twitter being tapped [via Journalism.co.uk].