Today, one of the biggest news publishers in the state, MediaNews, announced they will begin charging for their content. Amongst the MediaNews publications are the LA Daily News, the San Jose Mercury-News, and the Oakland Tribune.

MediaNews, which owns the Daily News of Los Angeles and other area papers through the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, said in a memo to employees that it will begin charging for online content with different premium tiers of access.

The memo, which was penned by MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton and President Jody Lodovic, said that giving away the content that appears in the print edition for free does an “injustice to our print subscribers” and creates “perceptions that our content has no value.”(BizJournals 5/12/09)

This is bad news for bloggers, readers, and our overall democracy. We rely on newspapers to be there for all the small stuff. To follow what’s going on in City Halls across the country, and to report back about how our society is working. And when it fails, it falls on journalists to give us the bad news.

But the MediaNews Corporate types got it exactly wrong when they say that relying on an open system gives the perception that it has no value.  See, the thing is that information desperately wants to be free.  Locking up information behind a wall does a disservice to us all.  And at any rate, the wall can only linger as long as it takes something to be noticed online.  Or, as Richard Stallman, the founder of GNU, said in the early days of the internet:

I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By ‘free’ I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one’s own uses… When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.

But the question that remains for MediaNews and all other publications, is what is the model that leads to long-term viability.  One important item to note is that these newspapers aren’t losing money right now, or at least most of them aren’t. They just aren’t making as much money as Wall Street desires.  And as many of these corporations are dependent upon debt, this is particularly true of MediaNews, they have to satisfy Wall Street.

Warren Hellman, a SF rich dude/financier (and sponsor of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass concert), is trying to come up with solutions for journalism. Whether it will be a non-profit paper is still unclear.  However, until he releases his plans in a few months we’ll just have to wait on those plans.

Perhaps an e-reader, like Amazon’s Kindle, is the answer, but fundamentally information should be in the free market. Walled gardens have failed in all but the most tightly controlled markets. Only the Wall Street Journal’s pay website has really succeeded, but that paper has a niche that others just don’t satisfy.  But if MediaNews goes pay-only, will people just look to the other papers in the region?

I don’t blame the papers for doing something to increase revenues, they are a business like any other. I simply fear that the attempt is misguided and will ultimately fail.  We need to find some sustainable model that will keep journalism open and sustainable. How that happens is still far from clear.