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The Washington Post, which launched a paid news application for Apple's iPhone on Wednesday, is also looking at other platforms but has no plans to charge for its website, a Post executive said.
Goli Sheikholeslami, Post vice president and general manager for digital operations, said the iPhone and iPod Touch application "gives us sort of a sandbox to experiment in and get an idea of what consumers find of value."
"We think it's sort of a great place to start to work on some of these paid premium products," Sheikholeslami told AFP.
The iPhone program, available through Apple's App Store, costs 1.99 dollars for 12 months and offers breaking news, reporting, analysis, features, blogs and other coverage from the newspaper.
With US newspapers facing a decline in print advertising revenue and circulation and a challenge from free news online, publishers have been searching for new ways to make money.
Sheikholeslami said the Post was looking at other mobile platforms including Google's Android and the Blackberry from Canada's Research in Motion.
"Blackberry and Android are very much on our road map," she said.
"We're definitely looking at the iPad," she added. "We're at the moment in the brainstorming phase of what is the right product for us to create on that platform.
"We think that consumer adoption of the iPad looks like something that will resonate in the market," Sheikholeslami said. "It would give us another platform to create another experience in the sense that it has different benefits than the iPhone does, different feature sets."
As for the Washington Post website, Sheikholeslami said there were no plans to start charging online readers as The Wall Street Journal already does and The New York Times plans to do starting early next year.
"We have no plans of putting either a meter system or a full paid wall in front of our website," she said. "We believe that the opportunity for growing and building our business on the website is as a free site."
The New York Times also has an iPhone application but it is currently free. A Times executive said last month that it has been downloaded more than 3.2 million times.
