Apparently there was a big meeting of news executives today in Chicago under the auspices of the Newspaper Association of America. The de jure name for the topic at hand was “Models to Monetize Content” but the de facto subject of the conclave seems to be building paywalls and ending what James Warren glibly calls “the age of content theft.” Such conversation needed to take place under the watchful eye of a legal counsel to avoid antitrust problems; but who can doubt that some sort of collective action — simultaneous, if ostentatiously uncoordinated — is at hand?

We are, then, nearing a moment of real decision on the part of the beleaguered newspaper industry, a genuine fork in the road. The papers can decide to keep participating in the open Web, which would require accepting that their legacy business — the old paper bundle and the broadcast model — is going to change into something almost unrecognizable. Or they can decide to put up the walls and gates and behave as if it’s 1997 again, and the Web is just a better delivery truck rather than an intricately evolving social organism. Down one path, dissolve into the Web; down the other, secede from the Web.

These two paths map neatly onto the two camps into which you can group virtually everyone in the old argument about the news business and the Web. On one side, you have the people who feel that newspapers simply took a wrong turn on their journey to the Internet. They were seduced by the Web hypesters! They should have charged for their articles from day one! Because they didn’t, they’re in a bind now — but their only hope is to shut the door belatedly and salvage what can be salvaged. We heard this same cry back in 2000-2002, during the last Web-business ice age.

If this is what you believe, then the appropriate business strategy is a no-brainer: Start charging your readers. Start demanding that Yahoo and Google et al. pay to link to you. Then see what happens — and, I’d advise, duck as the masonry starts to crumble.

In the other camp, the one where I put my own tent, you find everyone who believes that the Web has radically and irreversibly changed the way people get their information, weakening or dismantling all of the buttresses and structures that held the old business of media together. This change is neither all good nor all bad; but it is real, and wishing it away won’t help.

I’ve argued this position consistently for years now, but here is another angle worth considering. In at least one area, the newspaper web sites of the 90s didn’t give away the store. The Web was an obviously superior platform for delivering classified ads, but newspapers traditionally made a good chunk of their revenue from classifieds, so many newspapers adopted a sort of half-hearted classified strategy: if you paid for a print classified ad, you got a web listing free. Or maybe the paper would sell you a Web classified at a different rate from a print classified.

So, in this realm at least, the papers never committed that original sin of offering their product for free. What happened? The papers mostly sat tight and figured that their brand and their prominence in their communities would outweigh the lameness of their software and their indefensible overcharging for a product that now cost little or nothing to deliver. There were big venture-funded startup companies that set out to build standalone classified businesses, and some of them prospered as for-profit enterprises. But the greatest success of all came in the unlikely form of Craigslist, a community-based enterprise led by a shy programmer who offered classifieds not as a profit-making enterprise but (in all but a tiny subset of categories) as a free service.

As a result, newspapers’ classified businesses today have been devastated. But you can’t blame Craig Newmark; if he hadn’t done it, others would have, in some slightly different form. The Web itself made that inevitable. Newspapers had the opportunity to be Craig Newmark; they couldn’t imagine that. Regrettable, but understandable.

Similarly, you can blame Wikipedia for the woes of Encyclopedia Britannica’s paper-edition business, but really, it was less that unforeseen project that doomed the bound-volume encyclopedia than the very existence of the Web itself, which gave people an ill-ordered but livelier source for much of the information they sought.

In each of these cases, no one gave the store away. The shopkeepers didn’t play along, they tried to fight. But the scope of Web-induced change made their battle mostly hopeless. And their choice to fight the Web rather than work with it meant they only hastened their own downfall.

Similarly with the pay-wall argument. I fear that if our newspaper publishers take the collective charge-our-users approach, they will not only doom their own enterprises but will also make the transition we are currently facing — from a paper-and-broadcast news world to a purely digital one — longer and more wrenching.

If news publishers today accept that their future is online and that said future will not and cannot offer the same profit margins, or support the same size staff, as a monopoly, they can still participate in building new models for the new world. Some will survive and some will fail, but all of them (and all of us) will benefit from the lessons they can teach us. But if they shunt themselves off behind pay walls, they will not only surely fail, they will also make it far harder to seed the Web with the knowledge and experience of today’s professional journalists. The work of newsroom professionals will be cordoned off into their own disconnected islands online that fewer and fewer people will visit. New traditions will evolve independent of the old ones.

I can understand that news publishers — the owners and stockholders and managers — will do everything they can to cling to a failing model, because that is the way of the business world. A revenue stream is a revenue stream; it’s hard to give it up today, even when you know it’s going away tomorrow. But the journalists who care about their own craft’s values and traditions should think twice before applauding the intransigence of their business colleagues. In the long run, it will do nothing to save their jobs. And it will make it that much harder for all of us to rebuild a vibrant and sound news tradition online.

UPDATE: Recommended reading — Steve Buttry on “Seven reasons charging for content won’t work”

At Fort Mason last night it was Yet Another Panel on the Future of Newspapers. I went because of who was on the panel: the impressive investigative reporter and former Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll; Slate founder Michael Kinsley; and Phil Bronstein, my ertwhile boss at the old SF Examiner and more recently longtime editor of the SF Chronicle. NPR’s David Folkenflik moderated. I figured it might be worth listening, and a line out the door of the hall suggested plenty of other people did too.

The good news was that the event, titled “What Comes After Newspapers?,” really didn’t waste a lot of time asking, “How do we save newspapers?” but largely accepted that their day is ending. You might think this is obvious, but too many of these gatherings today are still stuck in rescue mode. The Senate hearing this week, for example, lingered far too long on plans for saving the bottom lines of newspaper publishing companies when it should have been talking about what the Fort Mason panel concentrated on: During the next period of transition, with an old business model collapsing and a new one not yet fully in sight, how do we insure the survival of the essential civic value journalists provide — keeping the public informed snd holding institutions and officials accountable?

This is where Coll started. He said he wasn’t plumping for the preservation of newspapers: “I don’t think there’s anything magical about a newsroom, or an entity that simultaneously publishes crossword puzzles and dispatches from Baghdad. I think that’s a beautiful thing, and it’s passing.” But “embedded in the newsroom is a system of independent reporting and investigation and witnessing,” and the public has an interest in seeing that survive.

He described how the “monopoly model” of newspaper ownership over the past four or five decades supported “a body of journalistic practice built up by accident,” one in which “persistent professional activity” by journalists creates a relationship between reporters and sources in which those sources are willing to “pass risky dangerous information down the pipe” because they trust it will be handled carefully and will reach the public intact. Monopoly power gave papers like the Post the resources to resist direct pressure from the government, even during Watergate. Can small web-based operations muster the same kind of backbone?

Wait a minute, Kinsley retorted: Don’t you think “bloggers in underwear” will be at least as resistant to such pressure as big corporations with profits to protect? Kinsley described the alarm over the future of news as “a large fuss over a medium-sized problem” and took a generally sanguine view of the Web as a locus for journalism. “There’s far more pressure for accuracy on the Internet than in traditional media,” he said. If “God forbid” the San Francisco Chronicle stops publishing, “some site will come up as the curator of news in San Francisco.”

Bronstein has hung up his editor’s hat to become a blogger for his paper, but he presided over its long decline, and he sounded rueful over missed opportunities and mistakes. “We were living in our own kind of bubble…There was all this possibility, and we were not really interested in it.” He spoke hopefully about new experiments online and described the value to reporters and newspapers of having comments open on their websites. But he was left without much to say when a former Chronicle copy editor stood up and asked, simply, what plans the Chronicle’s owners had for keeping journalists employed: “Where’s the conversation with the newsroom, the public articulation from Hearst?”

Coll reiterated his argument from a January blog post at the New Yorker on behalf of a “university-sized endowment” for a newsroom, to be provided by some generous benefactor to create a public-interest nonprofit entity of some kind. Of course, such nonprofit newsrooms already exist (in print, Poynter’s St. Petersburg Times, and on the web, ProPublica). If wealthy people can be persuaded to pony up for additional such enterprises, well, the more the merrier. But it seems to me that Coll’s vision is “Batten down the hatches, the dark ages are coming — let’s be sure we keep some monasteries around to hand the manuscripts and beer recipes on to future generations.” And I just don’t think things are quite that bad. There’s too much freedom to experiment on the Web, too many opportunities to make our way quickly through whatever transitions we face.

One such opportunity, personified, stepped forward during the Q&A: A young journalist who’s started up a blog that focuses on the 2010 census. Today we call this a “niche site”; but it’s also what we used to call a beat.

Some other interesting tidbits:

Coll mentioned that in the Senate hearing, Sen. Claire McCaskill had described the value to her of the two or three reporters (out of a much larger herd) who knew their stuff and paid close attention to what her office was doing: they kept her “scared” (in a good way). All of which made me think, hmmm, isn’t this exactly what’s happening to journalists themselves, as their work gets scrutinized by a crowd on the Web — many of whom don’t know what they’re talking about, but a handful of whom actually know more than the journalists, and can keep them honest — or scared?

Bronstein disagreed with David Simon’s complaint in his Washington testimony that bloggers don’t cover City Hall: they’re there, they’re “the people we used to refer to as gadflies.”

Also, sounding remarkably like a cranky blogger, he declared: “If you’ve ever been written about, there’s one thing you know — they never get it right.”

Coll, in response to a question about objectivity, described it as “a cultural artifct that is as strange as opera,” one that arose as a side-effect of the monopoly business model, in which newspapers had to aim for a broad reach and inclusive content.

In the Q&A, someone pointed out that decades ago most major U.S. cities had many newspapers. “We survived the collapse of newspaper competition in America. Is this worse?”

Here’s coverage of the event from the sponsor, and here’s video.