Interesting story outlining how newspapers who charge for online content are doing. In a nutshell- not all that well. This story outlines the decrease in traffic they have suffered as a result. However, it is much less clear whether or not that decrease in traffic has resulted in less revenue. I suspect that the revenue that was being generated from online advertising was so small prior to charging for content that any subscription revenue easily offsets it.

But this story from paidcontent.org doesn't really get into revenue, in typical web-centric fashion it focuses primarily on traffic:

Full story here

"As more newspapers kick around the idea of charging for content, much of the attention has been focused on the pay models employed by the bigger players like the WSJ and the Financial Times. But quietly, some small- and medium-circulation papers are coming up with their own formulas to get readers to pony up for access to their websites. We checked in with some of these papers to find out how much they are charging and how they’re faring.

This is, by no means, a complete list. But one can draw some general conclusions by looking at the experiences of what is admittedly a very sample size. The newspapers tend to be located in smaller, often rural markets; online-only subscriptions are typically priced at a substantial discount to the print edition (in general, about 75 percent of what the print product costs); where numbers are available, the number of online subscribers is still a tiny percentage of their print counterparts (less than 5 percent); and many of these papers say they began charging not so much to make money online, but rather to protect sales of their print editions."