It only looks like MediaNews is following the New York Times decision to go metered next year. But the planning has been in the works for a while and, in comparison to the NYT’s plans, MediaNews is moving a lot faster, Bloomberg reports. The pay system will launch on two of MediaNews’ 56 dailies by May; users will be able to access up to 25 “premium” articles per month—after that, the meter kicks in.  At that point, readers will have to choose between paying a fee for online access—MediaNews isn’t saying what it is yet—or subscribing to the print edition.

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How will they be able to move so much faster than the Times? They’ll be using Journalism Online’s Press+ to help process payments. The Times is building its own custom service; we have been told they may consider using some of the technology from Journalism Online, they won’t be using the system the Steve Brill-Gordon Crovitz startup has been working on for months. MediaNews can avoid the heavy lifting and the delays by piggybacking on JO, which is one of the points the company has been trying to make all along. (To address a point from Twitter, it’s true the two efforts aren’t comparable in scope but aside from that the Times opted for a longer process by building it from scratch.)