One of the most enduring enterprises providing environmental news on the Internet has just undergone a major change -- and is planning another one -- which its editors hope will pave the way for more growth.

On August 1, Environment News Service (ENS) began charging $24 a year for full access to the original wire-service coverage posted on its previously free website.

The Colorado-based organization is also planning to make articles available for purchase by daily newspapers and electronic media in September. They plan for and envision "a real wire service -- not a newsletter, not just a website, but a wire service for other news organizations," said Sunny Lewis, ENS's founder and editor-in-chief. "We get constant requests for the use of our materials."

Without a subscription-purchased password, visitors to the news service's website now have access only to three non-linked headlines. ENS regularly publishes a dozen or more articles daily on a Monday-to-Friday schedule. Lewis hopes regular readers (about 95,000 of whom have received an email summary of each edition) will be willing to pay for this steady stream of environmental and related coverage.

Initial signs are encouraging, she said. In the first days after the switch to a subscription policy was announced on July 14, there was "an overwhelmingly positive response."

The subscription move was "quite a change for us, it was a tough decision," she said, explaining that it will help ENS be "more financially stable," enabling expanded coverage of subjects such as renewable energy, transportation, agriculture and public health.

Environment News Service dates to the beginning of 1990, when articles were posted to one of the activist-oriented EcoNet's newsgroups and distributed by fax and in printed editions through regular mail.

"We soon dropped hard copy because it was too expensive," Lewis said. The ENS website was launched in 1996 with funds generated by E-Wire, an environmental press-release distribution service started by ENS managing editor Jim Crabtree.

For five years, until late last year, ENS was the featured providerof environmental news on the Web portal Lycos.

"There was a growing dissatisfaction on our part" with the affiliation, Lewis said. "There were casino (ads) and other popups that we didn't want over our news, and the ad revenue we got from them dwindled. We had to do a lot to keep up with their design changes."

She acknowledged that severing the Lycos link meant ENS experienced "a lean time there for awhile" but said the decision to move the privately-owned news service's own website to a subscription footing was unrelated.

An American from New York City, Lewis founded ENS after becoming interested in environmental issues while she worked as a journalist in Vancouver, British Columbia, where Greenpeace got started. "I knew a lot of those people," she said, "and followed their trials and tribulations."

One of her early interviews for the Canadian Broadcasting Company was with the late David McTaggart, a Greenpeace founder and longtime leader, with whom she became friends.

Her concept for ENS was not advocacy journalism, however, but a traditional wire service akin to Reuters, albeit with a specialized focus. "We really try to include all points of view and hew to the center line, to give as many points of view as are relevant to the issue at hand," Lewis said. (In addition to the news stories generated with that philosophy, ENS has a Seattle-based opinion columnist, Jackie Alan Giuliano, a self-described "deep ecologist" who writes from an outspoken environmentalist and animal-rights perspective.)

ENS opened its new headquarters in Boulder this year after stints in Arizona and Nevada. The eight-person staff (its largest to date) works there and at editorial offices in Washington and Seattle.

The news service also maintains a far-flung network of about 125 freelance correspondents in the U.S. and other nations. Not all these stringers are journalists, Lewis said. "A lot are professionals in another field, such as doctors and lawyers."

(A detailed July 16 article on overfishing, for instance, was written by a research associate at the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute, who holds a degree in earth systems.)

Most ENS stories are not bylined, including those written "from the desk" in Boulder, Lewis said. Shorter articles typically run 500-600 words, and longer articles (three or four of which are commonly posted each day) are often at least twice that long.

ENS's slogan is "We Cover The Earth For You," and its mix of stories regularly reflects an international focus. (Its June 27 article on Brazil's new deforestation rate was longer than reports by Reuters, the New York Times, and Britain's The Guardian.)

ENS articles appear on about 400 other websites, including those of universities, government agencies and private organizations in various countries, Lewis said.

She hopes that when newspapers and other news organizations start buying ENS articles, the extra income will fund more staff positions and more correspondents and also higher rates for freelance articles.

"The most frustrating part of the job is that no matter how many stories we do in a day -- generally 13 to 15 -- there are always hundreds of other good stories we have to turn away," Lewis said.

"I really feel that especially at this time, with media ownership concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, democracy is best served by having a wide variety of news services for readers to choose from. We often cover things other people don't touch."