Despite the adversity journalists from the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News have so far faced in their attempt to create a paid-subscription news website, MediaNews Group Inc., the owner of The Denver Post and 53 other daily newspapers across the country, is now latching on to the idea. MediaNews has plans to discontinue free online access to every story and will try charging readers for some of the content, writes the Denver Business Journal.

The May 8 memo outlining the plan surfaced via the Poynter Institute’s media watcher, Jim Romenesko: “Our interactive revenue growth has slowed because it has been too closely tied to our print classified business, which has suffered with the advent of points out that the memo “has already generated a handful of negative comments,” including one describing MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton as “completely nutso.”

INDenverTimes.com, a site created by former Rocky Mountain News scribes after the paper was shuttered in February, lured just 3,000 paying subscribers when its goal was 50,000 (via Elevated Voices).

MediaNews isn’t alone. Rupert Murdoch’s massive News Corp. “has assembled a team of executives to devise a system to charge for content on the web,” writes The New York Post, a News Corp. paper.