Regular readers know I keep tabs on Journalism Online, the pay-meter concept newspaper sites including the Star Tribune are considering. Journalism Online co-founder Gordon Crovitz is on the Strib's board, and when I interviewed Strib CEO Mike Klingensmith this spring, he had a Journalism Online document on his conference table.

Now comes word from the Poynter Institute's Bill Mitchell that Journalim Online's system has been released into the wild; its first adopter is LancasterOnline, which serves a swath of south-central Pennsylvania.

What will be metered? Obituaries! Insert newspaper-audience-dying-off jokes here.

Metering lets publishers determine how much content is free before users pay. In the case of Lancaster Online, non-locals get seven obit pages before the $1.99 monthly charge kicks in.

Laugh if you want — and I'll admit, I'm tittering — but any small-town newspaper publisher will tell you obits are a pretty big deal for readers. In this case, LancasterOnline is making money coming and going (if you'll pardon the pun): they charge survivors to place death notices, and now they'll charge out-of-towners to read them.

(When the younger generations start dying, we'll just inform everyone via social networks.)

This sure sounds like a low-revenue road test to me, but Lancaster Online's editor thinks they can squeeze $100,000 out of the oldster demographic that keeps up regularly with far-flung deaths. That seems incredible, and Mitchell later says anything over $10,000 will be considered a success. If older folks will actually pay up for bad news, maybe they're onto something. Mitchell's stats and scenarios are worth reading through.

While Klingensmith has spoken favorably of metering, and the Strib is steaming toward a website re-do that could happen later this year, no vendor has been picked.