by: Mathew Ingram | GigaOm

As should be obvious to anyone who has even glanced at the newspaper business recently, much of the media industry is gripped by paywall fever, with outlets of all kinds trying to recreate the success of a New York Times or Financial Times-style subscription model. But I think there is something more interesting going on in a few places, namely an attempt to create something more like a membership model than a blanket paywall around all of a publication’s content — and one of the more interesting of these recent experiments is the one from Talking Points Memo, the political blog network founded by Josh Marshall. Whether it is a financial success for the site or not remains to be seen, but I think there are a number of reasons why it is worth paying attention to.