I concur. My fear is that, if individual newspapers don’t take firm steps now to regain control of the value of their content — in a way that minimally reduces the accessibility of that content — that many newspapers will fold or be absorbed into large conglomerations.

I have little doubt that if that happens, those surviving conglomerations will have little reluctance in taking steps against bloggers and aggregators that will make the RIAA look tame.

I think you and I are in more agreement on this than this post makes it seem, see my earlier post on subscription revenue.

The really tricky part in my mind is that, philosophically, locking up the news behind any kind of wall is bad for democracy. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing than anyone in the world can get news from all over the world, for free, on their computer.

So newspapers need to make money for the service they provide, but they should try to do it in ways that don’t detract from the value that the internet brings to news.

In my mind this is the big dilemma.

I wandered over here from our conversation at Recovering Journalist. I think you have some good points here, but I disagree with your suggestion that charging directly for content can’t work.

TimesSelect didn’t fail — it just didn’t work as well as the Times wanted it to. It was making money when they shut it down.

I think part of the problem was that the Times chose to lock up its columnists. The Times has great opinion writers, but let’s face it, there’s a lot of free opinion out there on the Web. The stuff that actually was unique — the Times’s international and national news — remained free.

It’s interesting to note that the exceptions to the “free” rule are doing more or less OK. The WSJ dabbled with going free, but decided against it once Murdoch saw their profit statements. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette isn’t free (see an interesting piece on that at http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4427), and while it’s recently experienced some pain from the overall economic slump, it has in general weathered the storm much better than other papers.

People like to call these things “exceptions” that somehow aren’t relevant to other newspapers. Why not? Yes, the WSJ can count on businesses buying subscriptions for its business reporting, but that doesn’t explain how its online audience grew to rival the total circulation of most newspapers. Sure, the Democrat-Gazette is a local daily with limited competition — but doesn’t that describe most newspapers?

I’d like to see newspapers try your ideas, but I’d also like them to try the enormously unpopular idea of actually selling what they make, either directly through online subscriptions or indirectly, perhaps by partnering up with a cable company and becoming a “premium channel” like HBO.

Seriously, could it make things any worse? Online revenue is on average less than 10 percent of newspapers’ income. If they lost all of that through experimenting with charging for content, it would make a terrible situation only 10 percent worse.

If you’re in the content business (which every newspaper is in), I think it’s best not to stray too far from your core mission. Content is viable online, I just think we haven’t gotten there yet.