It's easy to charge for high-quality national news. In America, there are basically three sources of this: The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. If all three start charging for news that can only be found in those publications, they'll be fine. Cable news websites don't currently offer the same quality of news as those three do, and function more as of a competitor to USA Today.
Local news is where things get more complicated. Local newspapers have plenty of competition from TV station websites that suck, but probably don't suck enough to make people want to pay for news. Most papers have already stripped themselves so thin that they don't offer much more than aggregated bloggers and press releases could. In-depth journalism has been relegated to the alt-weeklies. I think there are several ways local newspapers could make more money online, but they seem more interested in laying off people to cut costs than figuring out how they're going to survive.
Local news is where things get more complicated. Local newspapers have plenty of competition from TV station websites that suck, but probably don't suck enough to make people want to pay for news. Most papers have already stripped themselves so thin that they don't offer much more than aggregated bloggers and press releases could. In-depth journalism has been relegated to the alt-weeklies. I think there are several ways local newspapers could make more money online, but they seem more interested in laying off people to cut costs than figuring out how they're going to survive.