The moves come at a time when papers throughout the country are drastically cutting staff to cope with declining advertising revenues that have historically paid for newsgathering. Some papers have closed while others are teetering. Others have given up on print and are going with a Web-only model, such as the Tucson Citizen, Arizona's oldest newspaper, which printed its last edition Saturday.Many journalists and media observers believe newspapers should have always charged for stories posted online, although the track record for a pay-for-news approach is far from proven. "What scares me about serious news organizations putting up pay walls is that not only are they going to kill their relevance by locking the content out of the national dialogue, but also the advertisers will flee," said Vivian Schiller, president and chief executive of National Public Radio. In 2007, she was senior vice president of NYTimes.com when it ended Times Select, a premium service that charged subscribers $10 per month. The service had 225,000 subscribers, but growth had flattened.Publishers had long believed the future lay in growing traffic to Web sites with free content supported by advertising. But those revenues haven't grown fast enough to replace lost print revenue, including the permanent shift of classified ad dollars to free online sites. Those problems, combined with declining print circulation and the recession, have forced some publishers to change strategy and shift more of the cost of news to readers.In a memo sent to MediaNews Group employees May 8, Chief Executive William Dean Singleton said the company "will begin to move away from putting all of our newspaper content online for free. Instead, we will explore a variety of premium offerings that apply real value to our print content."The Denver firm publishes 54 papers around the country, including the San Jose Mercury News, the Oakland Tribune, the Contra Costa Times and several other Bay Area dailies. MicropaymentsOfficials at the Wall Street Journal also revealed similar plans to charge for premium content in niche markets and set up a system to charge non-subscribers to pay to read stories. Some industry leaders hope micropayment systems mimic the success of Cupertino computer giant Apple Inc., which changed the music industry by selling individual digital songs for 99 cents via its online store.More ...