Is there a way to reverse the broad expectation that information, including content assembled and produced by professionals, should be free? If print wants to perform a cashectomy on users, it should probably look to what happened with music, an industry in which people once paid handsomely for records, then tapes, then CDs, that was overtaken by the expectation that the same product should be free.
The important difference here is that during the heyday of Napster and KaZaa, this was still an illegal thing to do. So, while the music business clearly fucked themselves by being so late on the mp3, they still found some light in CD sales and, later, iTunes, because these were perfectly legal things to do -- peer-to-peer sharing was not.
Contrast this with online media outlets, such as the New York Times and The New Yorker, which you have been able to read online legally. What this means is that charging a fee for the online Times is not analogous to charging a fee to rip songs off of iTunes. In the latter case, you are providing a user-friendly and modern method of easily getting music to the large segments of the population that were too afraid or not technologically savvy enough to use Napster. In the former case, you are putting a premium on content that has been free for years.
Also, two possible problems come to mind. The first is that, like it or not, it's still the Internet, which means that whatever firewall you attempt to erect to make your site pay-only, someone will break it down. The second is that, is the loss in readership (and thus, ad clicks) that will come from charging a fee really worth whatever revenues you could accumulate from the fee?
