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.

In 1994 Louis Rossetto cranked up HotWired and believed he was ushering in the professionalization of the Web. It was time to rout all the anarchists and the hackers and the amateurs who thought the Internet was all about self-expression (and them). “The era of public-access Internet has come to an end,” he declared. He didn’t mean that the public would no longer be able to access the Internet, of course; he was drawing an analogy to public-access TV. Just as that once-promising avenue for citizen media had been eclipsed by the pros of the cable world, so, he reasoned, the Web would similarly leave the amateurism of its youth behind.

Nick Carr believes this is still going to happen, but many of us today understand that the opportunity the Web affords all of us to add to it lies at the heart of the medium’s identity. It’s not some minor feature of the medium’s youth that will be sloughed off as maturity arrives. It’s not some incidental efflorescence of excess creativity that will vanish once the laws of supply and demand kick in. It is what makes the Web tick. You can try to ignore that, and use the Web as a mere replacement for paper and trucks, but why bother? You will lose your readers and your future.

I thought of all this as I read reports today of Rupert Murdoch’s pronouncement that “The current days of the internet will soon be over.” Phrased that way, the prediction makes it sound like the end times are near. But the only apocalypse in sight, I’m afraid, is that of the old-line news industry, if it insists on pursuing dead-end subscription models for general-interest Web products.

There is money to be made on the Web for the providers of information, but it will never be made by locking away generic news and opinion articles and charging subscription fees to access them. Cutting your content off from the rest of the Web in this fashion robs it of its Webbiness. It’s like a movie producer in the 1930s saying, “Hey, let’s make talkies!”, but then turning off the sound in the theaters.

Murdoch, and any other publisher who shuts the gates, may well boost his bottom line in the short term. But in the medium term and beyond he is simply guaranteeing the slow decline and ultimate irrelevance of his publication. This is painful for journalists and media execs to hear, but they need to hear it — just as, back in 1994, Rossetto needed to hear that no, actually, “public access” was exactly what the Web was all about.

I did a lot of digging around in the numbers around blogging for my book, so I’m on alert when I read a piece like Mark Penn’s look at pro blogging in the Wall Street Journal, which is getting lots of attention this morning. A little skepticism is definitely in order.

Here’s the nub of hard numbers in Penn’s piece:

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That’s almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click — whether on their site or someone else’s.

Where do these numbers come from?

“20 million bloggers” links to a 2008 report from Emarketer that costs $695 if you actually want to know how they got their numbers (I confess I haven’t made the investment).

“1.7 million profiting” links to a promotional page for BlogWorld Expo that cites no source at all for its data.

“452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income” is drawn from a Mediabistro rewrite of numbers from Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere reports. Technorati’s are the longest-running and most valuable, and consistent, series of blogging studies over time, but like any study’s numbers, they can be easily misrepresented: here, Penn relies on them for the datum that bloggers who reach 100,000 uniques a month can earn $75K a year. But if you read the source, you find this:

The average income was $75,000 for those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors per month (some of whom had more than one million visitors each month). The median annual income for this group is significantly lower — $22,000.

In other words, the $75K average is skewed by a handful of outlier successes, but the great majority of bloggers who get 100,000 uniques/month earn more like $22,000. Here, the median is far more relevant than the average. Penn, of all people, knows this.

Later on, Penn’s piece cites other sources, including a Pew study and this iLibrarian post which references a 2008 study by an outfit called BIGResearch. The BIGResearch study particularly flummoxed me as I was researching my book, and in email correspondence with a company representative I got to the root of the oddness of their numbers: Their study defined “blogger” as, basically, anyone who writes or reads a blog. That’s one way to muddy the waters!

The methodology of Penn’s piece seems to be: gather as many numbers as you can and don’t worry about the fact that they are from many different sources at different times using different methodologies and even differing definitions of what it means to “be a blogger” — just toss them all together and start drawing conclusions. Those conclusions, in turn, seem to be based on a misapprehension that bloggers are by definition opinion writers. Many are, to be sure; but many others — particularly in the “pro blog” world Penn focuses on — concentrate on becoming expert sources in a particular area, or informational services, or link reviews.

My suggestion to Penn (who — full disclosure — I briefly worked for, decades ago, during my college years, when he was starting his company): You should commission a real study of blogging, using real sampling techniques, and share the results with the world. No one has done this yet that I’m aware of. You know how to do it! And we’d get a lot better information than this crazy-quilt pastiche of mix-‘n’-match stats.

UPDATE: Penn has posted an addition to his column that goes into more detail about the numbers. “I was surprised at how few studies there are on this,” he writes, “and I believe there definitely should be more. So perhaps in the future I will do some original research, but for this piece we took the best we could find and referenced every number so people would know where they came from.”