Which would you be more likely to pay for, stories in the NYT or your local paper?

With all the talk lately about customers-pay models for journalism, I started thinking: If a national publication like the New York Times or Washington Post and your local newspaper (assuming you don’t live in a huge metropolitan area) both started charging for their content, which would you be more likely to pay for?

On one hand, I can see the hardcore news readers and politicos paying for the NYT or Washington Post to get their national political coverage. However, I’m not one of those. I care about the big national news stories, but on an everyday basis, I’m probably more interested in local news. Also, while I appreciate the quality of writing in the NYT and WaPo, the fact is that if I’m just looking for the basic facts on a national story, chances are I can get them from a free, generic wire story, and I can probably get analysis/opinion of varying qualities from blogs. On the other hand, if I’m looking for news on my community, there are far fewer places where I can go for that aside from my local newspaper. So for me, I would probably be more likely to pay for my local paper’s content.

That brings up this question: Which class of newspapers would be more successful at charging for content, big, national pubs like NYT or the smaller local papers? On one hand, papers like NYT and WaPo have huge national and international followings and the name recognition. On the other hand, the stories they cover are such big, national subjects that they aren’t the only players in the game, and free substitutes for their content (if not their quality) are often readily available. There are no shortage of non-newspaper sources covering and analyzing big national news, but nowhere near as many for local news, especially when you don’t live in a big city. I think that “uniqueness” of content would tend to work in the smaller papers’ favor. And if that’s the case, perhaps they should be the ones to take the lead in experimenting with pay online models instead of waiting for the big names to try something (not that any newspaper company should be passively sitting on its butt waiting for others to try things out first at this point).