With all the talk about newspapers charging for their online editions, we’re always curious to see how it actually works out. Now along comes a paper that is going to charge more for its online version than the print.

“Our goal was to get people back into the printed product,” publisher Albert K. Sherman, Jr. told the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Ed Delaney. The idea is simple, if counterintuitive in a Web 2.0 world: don’t undercut your primary product with a free alternative that doesn’t make you money. And provide an online edition for those customers who have a compelling reason to pay for content.

There will be three tiers at the 12,000-circulation Rhode Island newspaper:

– Home delivery of the print paper – $145 a year.
– Home delivery + online access – $245.
– Online only of the entire paper – $345.

The News is offering a 30-day free trial for the electronic edition, and all users are still in that window.

The paper started requiring (free) registration on June 1. Visitors to the site immediately dropped by two-thirds. That doesn’t bode well. In its favor, the News has never given its readers access to the entire paper on line before – only a limited selection of its stories were online.

Publisher Sherman was already pessimistic about the Web. “The people we hired to sell advertising on the Internet just never did very well,” he said.

Our take: it will be interesting to see how it pans out but, as online access to everything, everywhere at any time shows no signs of stopping, it’s hard to imagine how a retro print-first policy is going to save the Newport News, or other newspapers for that matter.