Again, the expert's advice must be compelling enough to bring people back to the site. I would want to make being a 'member' a fee-based thing, but I don't know if that would work for a newspaper site as well as it has worked for me with RVClub, but requiring people to pay encourages a greater commitment to the community. Have them interact with users as the official voice of the site on a daily, hourly, basis. If you want repeat visitors, you've got to create a site that is important to people's lives. Simply slapping some news stories up isn't going to cut it.
News is too easy to get.
Its value as a commodity is almost nil. But giving people the ability to make connections with other people and feel like they are a part of and a contributor to something bigger than themselves is still priceless. It will never go out of fashion or be undervalued. If you have a newsworthy item about the newspaper new media business, please send me a note.