• Newsweek, Tuesday, September 1, 2009 10:01 PM

When the Newport Daily News in Newport, R.I. started charging people for online offerings, critics thought readers would be gone for good. Instead, they began returning to the newsstand. This summer, the paper began requiring a $345 annual subscription fee for its online news -- $200 more than for the print edition.

What happened? First, the phones stopped ringing in the paper's circulation department, as fewer subscribers were canceling home delivery of the paper, something they had been doing in droves. Then, readers would brave driving rainstorms to go out and buy the newspaper. Newsstand sales jumped by 200 copies a day, a significant gain for a paper with a daily circulation of 13,000.

Publishers nationwide will be watching the Newport Daily News as other beleaguered papers begin charging visitors for online news. Many of those publishers are hoping to generate a new stream of revenue from paying Web customers. The lesson of the Newport paper, however, was that the online pay wall drove readers away from the Web, and back to print.

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