Newspapers worldwide are being forced to reinvent themselves for the internet age - and will be watching closely the success of two experiments launched in London, analyst say.

Suffering a long-term fall in sales and a collapse in advertising revenue as the world goes online for its news, the press has for years been scrambling to decide how to respond.

In Britain, Rupert Murdoch's Times and Sunday Times finally went ahead from last Friday with their long-promised plan to start charging readers for online access to their journalism, the first non-specialist British papers to do so.

The move comes after the less expected news last week that London's city-wide daily, the Evening Standard, hopes to break even after turning itself into a freesheet for commuters, ditching its 50 pence cover price.

That decision cut the paper's distribution costs from 30 to four pence per copy, and sent readership soaring from just over half a million to 1.3 million, its new Russian owners said.

"The industry is still at a very early stage of this rapid evolution forced on it by digital technology," Karin von Abrams, a senior analyst at eMarketer, told AFP.

"The game clearly has changed for most old business models, but we don't yet know what the successful new ones are going to be."