Chile's "Las Ultimas Noticias"

This newspaper has a different business model. They publish online a day early, and then when they prepare the print edition they decide how to put together the paper according to how many clicks each article got in the online edition. This is a stark contrast to how many American newspapers use the web. The New York Times and many other papers publish their articles online, but expect users to complete a free registration and log in in order to view the articles. This has the unfortunate effect of preventing the newspaper from showing up in any search engines. The LA Times is ditching its national print edition, citing competition from online news sources as being more competitive. You can still find many users that do not like reading on a computer screen with good reason. However, this demonstrates that there is a significant portion of us who do not mind.
Why haven't American newspapers experimented with new ways of using the 'net?
One could argue that Chile's "Las Ultimas Noticias" experiment will simply create an even more sensationalist paper than traditional methods. Is that the case? Is that a problem?