To charge or not to charge: that has been a question for online information providers, and especially newspapers, since the dawn of the internet era.

This week, The New York Times, which after years of being all-free decided to charge for some of its content two years ago, finally threw in the towel. Revenue from Times Select, as the subscription service was known, just wasn't enough to make up for the ad revenue that could be earned if everything was free (and thus much more heavily read). And The Wall Street Journal, the last of the big paid news sites, is expected by many to change its model too as it moves under the News Corp umbrella.

For people in the news business, this is an emotional issue, not just a business question. It's hard to give away things that people used to pay for. It's especially hard to give away things in one form (electronic) while charging for them in another form (print). And in the gut it's hard to get past what feels like rejection: all my hard work isn't worth even a few cents a day to most readers?

At NewWest.Net, we got over this a long time ago. We never seriously considered charging for content, and hardly any new online publications do so. In fact, when we helped start a new newspaper in Montana, the Flathead Beacon, we decided to make the paper free. That's the direction in the print world too. Free daily newspapers on the subway, free weekly newspapers in the racks, free magazines in the mail.

Yet I don't really see this as the simple one-way trend that it might appear to be. Even as traditional print publications go free, cable and satellite TV channels continue to increase their rates (and at least some subscription channels, like HBO, continue to do well). Mobile phone companies are exploiting their gatekeeper position to charge for all kinds of things – and especially ringtones, which oddly enough turn out to be one of the better revenue streams in digital music business.

With satellite radio, people pay a monthly subscription for something they once got for nothing. My eight-year-old son insists on spending his allowance to be a member of Club Penguin, a virtual world for kids that was recently bought by Disney.

In the news business, advertising has always paid most of the freight – and of course in the print world the freight is a very literal thing. Newspapers require big manufacturing plants and fleets of trucks and all that, and while web publications are not as cheap as people think, they are certainly cheaper to run than newspapers.

The issue for newspapers is not, in the end, that people don't want to pay for the product. The issue is that the product has a lot more competition that it used to, and it's not meeting the needs of the majority of people in that way that it used to. The basics of the news is now a commodity, and it's hard to charge for that. The more sophisticated, in-depth news that you get from the quality big-city papers, well, people will pay for that. They just won't pay as much as the advertisers will pay to be in front of them.

The ability to charge, then, is not really a function of the perceived value of the offering. It's a function of the business model. And as the online media world evolves, there will be lots of and lots of new business models. Some of them will involve subscriptions. Indeed, at NewWest.Net we are working on what we're calling a "membership" model that will involve an annual fee for local businesses.

Paid models are not dead, they're just assuming new forms. And in that regard The New York Times' decision is not any big landmark. It's just a sign of a company experimenting with different approaches as its business changes. Nothing to get too emotional about in that.

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