The problem with newspapers is that if they paywall all of their articles, they won't get any viewers because nobody knows what kind of articles they write without subscribing. A lot of them have an 'X free articles per month' thing, but since I'm on three different machines, I've never hit that limit unless it was like one or two a month.
1. Make certain articles freely available. They're not stupid--they can figure out which ones will draw people in.
2. Do it LWN-style: the current week's edition requires a subscription, after that it's free. If it's well-written, people will pay to not be a week behind.