Newspapers Want Cash for Content. Tough Luck

Newspapers are going to war with the Internet--or trying to.

So far it's more accurately a phony war. Newspapers aren't really doing anything other than saber rattling. While they might be threatening to charge for their content, or, in the case of the Associated Press, which is owned by newspaper publishers, threatening unspecified legal action against some unspecified use of AP content, their real act of aggressiveness is a little storm of newspaper stories about charging for content. We're so mad, in other words, we're going to write bad things about you.

It's a nostalgist's story about the value of what newspapers offer, and about trying to conjure some clever business circumstance in which people online might pay for that theoretical value. It imagines nothing less than the conversion of a medium that has, in its 14 years of commercial existence, achieved ubiquity by being free to a paid business model. It's a plaintive appeal. "Airlines charge for luggage, meals, even pillows," pleads the New York Times.

Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, now the world's dominant content distributor, gave a speech yesterday about this very issue, which was so bland it seemed to mock the controversy itself.

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