So says Richard Pérez-Peña of the New York Times, “in what could be the first glimpse at a new strategy by national newspapers to capitalize on the contraction of regional papers.”

Both The Journal and The Times seem to be betting that the Bay Area is the place to try first. Its biggest newspapers, The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Jose Mercury News, have suffered through some of the sharpest downsizing in the industry, and a very high percentage of the region’s residents moved from elsewhere, which usually means less attachment to the local paper.

“I think the San Francisco area is the most obvious market to try this in, because it’s big, it’s sophisticated and it’s getting progressively more poorly served by its papers,” said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute. But if the strategy takes off in multiple cities, he said, the national papers should worry that “they’d be seen as administering the final death blows to these metro dailies.”