Newspapers have declared free content the enemy. But who are the allies?

Dear reader, the newspapers are sorry. They made a terrible mistake that drove you away: For years and years, they let you read their stories online for free. And so in the depths of the worst recession of our lives, they are now going to make us all pay.

If that sounds at all illogical, there's an excellent chance you are not a newspaper executive. It makes sense to Les Hinton, CEO of News Corp.'s (NWS) Dow Jones & Co. and publisher of the Wall Street Journal, who not only acknowledged the mistake in a recent speech but credited it with feeding Google's (GOOG) vampyric "lust for newspaper blood." Hinton said all those free news stories on the Web "gave Google's fangs a great place to bite." (Somebody's been watching too many episodes of True Blood: As many Web surfers know, you can bypass the Journal's pay walls by cut-and-pasting the headline into Google News.)

But this conceit plays well in the media industry, where more and more executives are getting excited about the idea of charging readers for online news. At a recent advertising conference, media veteran Barry Diller said, "I absolutely believe that the Internet is passing from its free phase into a paid system." The free lunch readers have enjoyed on the Web so far, Diller said, is an accident that the next few chaotic years will fix.

Even Richard Posner, an appeals-court judge whose writing on topics from terrorism to economics are influential, argued that copyright law could be extended to online news "to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent." If there's a silver bullet to slay Google News, it can be found in copyright law.

Before things get that far, newspapers are likely to fumble around with experiments to find out if and how much readers will pay on the Internet. Medianews—which owns the San Jose Mercury News, the Denver Post, and 52 other papers—plans to start charging for some online stories by year's end. The Newport Daily News, a 14,000-circulation paper in Rhode Island, charges $345 a year for an online subscription to a page-for-page digital replica of the print edition. A year's subscription to the print paper is only $145. And that's the whole idea: If everyone's reading your online paper for free, charge them so much that the paper looks cheap by comparison. Now, that's a bargain.

Meanwhile, companies like Journalism Online and ViewPass are creating e-commerce technology to help newspapers charge readers for stories while gathering personal data on them for free. (This idea of paying for information is apparently a one-way street.) So far, Journalism Online is generating greater buzz, claiming to have signed up several newspapers that will start charging monthly or per-article fees as early as this fall. Its strategy is to hide just enough news stories behind pay walls to entice 5 percent or 10 percent of readers into subscriptions while giving up less than 10 percent of ad revenue. Among Journalism Online's founders is Steve Brill, whose past efforts to charge for content online have led to painful defeats. In 2001, Brill bought Inside.com and merged it with his Brill's Content magazine, only to see both shut down six months later. His controversial micro-payment venture Contentville also went down in flames. (Brill's most recent startup, the Clear card, intended to speed members through airport security lines, shut down last month after raising $116 million.)