It's undeniable that the going rate for information on the internet is "free." That's meant big trouble for newspapers, which have seen nearly all of their traditional roles usurped by better, faster, free online services over the past few years. If a newspaper doesn't make its content available gratis on the Web, it's irrelevant. If it does, it's got nothing left to sell but fishwrap and inkstains.

The Wall Street Journal's publisher Les Hinton has called Google a "digital vampire," but even his paper, one of the last holdouts of subscription-based online content, has made its articles' full text ...

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