A top executive at Hearst, which publishes 16 newspapers including the Houston Chronicle and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, said the company is mulling how much of its online offerings to keep free, while reserving some content exclusively for people who pay.“Exactly how much paid content to hold back from our free sites will be a judgment call made daily by our management, whose mission should be to run the best free Web sites in our markets without compromising our ability to get a fair price from consumers for the expensive, unique reporting and writing that we produce each day,” Steven Swartz, the president of Hearst newspapers, said in a staff memo.As newspapers’ online advertising has slowed sharply or started to decline, a growing chorus has pushed for newspapers to give up their free Web sites, and instead charge money to access individual stories or sites. Cablevision Systems Corp. said Thursday it plans to turn the free Web site for its Newsday daily into a subscription site, potentially only for Cablevision customers.If newspapers turn off their free Web sites completely, the number of surfers is almost certain to decrease, but the financial impact is unclear – largely because there are few large-scale models in existence. (News Corp.’s The Wall Street Journal is the largest newspaper to offer paid online subscriptions, but it has been doing so since the inception of its Web site more than a decade ago.)More ...