My hometown newspaper, the Missoulian, does a decent job for a small-town daily, but like a lot of entrenched print publications it's having trouble getting its arms around the online thing. And it recently took a step that shows just how contentious the debate still is around how newspapers should deal with new media.

When you go to Missoulian.com, you now find three headlines under the special header "Only in the Missoulian." When you click on one of those stories, you don't get the story, and you don't even get a chance to buy the story or sign up for an online subscription. Instead, you're invited to subscribe to the print newspaper.

This is old-school thinking in the extreme: a decade back editors and publishers were fixated on how to avoid having their online offerings cannibalise the print product, but most realised long ago that offering a crippled web edition was not the answer. It's hard to believe that many people would interrupt their online reading to order a print publication, but the fear of plunging print circulation apparently runs deep.

I was surprised a few months ago to hear publishers of really small Montana newspapers discuss the question of how much of their content they should withhold from the web, lest people not read the print. But the Missoulian, well, it's not all that small, and it's owned by Lee Enterprises, one of the nation's biggest newspaper chains; surely they would know better.

But the truth is, even though most big-city papers have decided that a robust, free website is the only viable strategy, there is still surprising lack of consensus on this question. In many smaller markets, where there is much less competition than in the major cities, newspapers have adopted a paid subscription model. In my neighbourhood, for example, the Spokane Spokesman Review and the Idaho Falls Post Register both require payment for the online product.

Even among the large papers, there is still a lot of tooing and froing around the question of paid versus free. At the Los Angeles Times, where I used to work, the powers that be decided a couple of years ago to charge for the flagship entertainment coverage. But that strategy was quickly abandoned.

At The New York Times, you can no longer read the featured columnists without paying for a subscription service called Times Select. The Wall Street Journal, long the only major paper to have a subscription website, has doggedly stuck to its guns in the face of criticism that it risks diminishing the reach and impact of the world's greatest financial news brand. Rather than make wsj.com free, it opted to pay a premium to acquire Marketwatch.com, a free financial news site.

The rub for publishers is that, on the one hand, ad revenues even from a well-trafficked website don't approach what can be had in the print paper, but on the other hand requiring subscriptions diminishes traffic so radically that the payments don't make up for the lost ad revenue. There's no sign that anyone has figured out a way out of this box.

In the case of self-defeating strategies like the Missoulian's, I also think there is a strong emotional element at play (and not just because I've had some fun at the publisher's expense). Local newspaper people, who are used to profitable quasi-monopolies, just can't stand the idea that people can now get free what they once had to pay for. They're angry, and defensive, and that sometimes leads people to do dumb things.

I've been berated by more than one local newspaper person for linking to their online stories, as if a one-sentence reference and a link were "stealing." Links, I try to explain, are good for you, they point people and traffic to your site. Aggregation, as anyone in the media business understands all-too-well, is important in an age of information overload, and good aggregators (like Google) are almost always your friend. But if you're used to being the only source, able to dictate how people get (your) information, that argument is cold comfort.

Original journalism is not a cheap undertaking, and there are legitimate questions around how journalism will be supported in the age of the free. But trying to dictate where and how people get their news, as opposed to offering it where and how they want it, is not going to be the answer.

Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a new type of regional news and information service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

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