Following the closure of the Rocky Mountain News earlier this year, several of the newspaper’s former reporters and editors have launched online-only news publications. The latest to join them is Kevin Flynn, perhaps Colorado’s most prolific and in-depth transportation reporter. His Inside Lane site aims to provide readers with “more news and views on Colorado’s transportation system than you can get anywhere else.”

The site joins a growing list of projects by former Rocky scribes, such as INDenverTimes and the Rocky Mountain Independent. While the sites at the moment are providing content for free, the newspaper industry may well clamp down on the unpaid proliferation of articles online.

A startup venture called Journalism Online, whose founders include Steve Brill, the creator of CourtTV, and Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, has reached a preliminary agreement with more than 500 newspapers serving 90 million visitors to explore ways to get readers to pay for online content (via the Los Angeles Times).

Meanwhile, the prestigious Financial Times has long charged online viewers for news. Now that other newspapers seem to be coming around to such a model, chief executive John Ridding feels vindicated: Advertising alone doesn’t fully fund online news operations. “Quality journalism has to be paid for,” he tells The New York Times.