Editor & Publisher is reporting that William Dean Singleton, owner of the Reformer, wants to put less print content on the web for free.

A May 8 memo to employees of MediaNews outlines the company's new web strategy.

They have decided to charge for online content. "We 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. We are not trying to invent new premium products, but instead tell our existing print readers that what they are buying has real value, and to our online audience (who don't buy the print edition), that if you want access to all online content, you are going to have to register, and/or pay. "

They want to differentiate the news sites from the newspaper and have plan for doing so. "The websites, newspaper.com as we call them now, will become a different product. This new site, which we have been calling news.com, will be a regional news site that is actively managed to present breaking news. It will continue to draw a content from the newspaper (but probably in a more abbreviated form), but will also have user-generated content, community involvement and third party content. News.com will continue to serve our existing audience, which spends a lot of time on our sites, and drive significant traffic. They like and depend on our sites for their national and local news. We must not alienate them as we strive to expand our audience and attract younger people and non newspaper subscribers. "

They also have a new plan to reach those younger audiences. "We will build a new local utility site (Local.com), which is an ecosystem of local information, resources, user content, shopping guides, and marketplaces. This site will be focused on a younger audience as well as other targeted audiences based on demographics which are attractive to our current and potential advertisers."

"Central to this local site will be an aggregation of city or community sites (in the YourHub model) and marketplaces. Local.com will be the ultimate site for people to find stuff, do stuff, and get stuff done in their local market...." and "We will build these out with a common template, for ease of execution and maintenance, and deploy across the company."

Newspapers such as the New York Times have tried charging for online content, only to open it back up for free after the experiment failed to produce the desired results.

Aggregated community sites with common templates also have a poor track record. Backfence closed 13 sites in 2007 after they failed to attract the readership they needed.