What if online portals had nothing but 'digital fish wrap'?

WHAT IF ONLINE PORTALS HAD NOTHING BUT 'DIGITAL FISH WRAP'?
[SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle 11/12, AUTHOR: Peter Scheer, California First Amendment Coalition]
[Commentary] Reports of the imminent death of newspapers are, as a good print journalist once said, greatly exaggerated. Newspapers, especially big metropolitan dailies, are suffering, to be sure. They are losing editorial staff as a result of layoffs at nearly the rate they have been losing advertising to the Internet. Although the industry as a whole is still decently profitable, valuations have been falling because the markets, focused on revenue trends that point only downward, are panicked about the future. The herd is betting that newspapers are in a death spiral, but some very smart investors think otherwise. The challenge to newspapers today is how to realize the value in their news content. Scheer proposes that newspapers and wire services need to figure out a way, without running afoul of antitrust laws, to agree to embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period -- say, 24 hours -- after it is made available to paying customers. The point is not to remove content from the Internet, but to delay its free release in that venue.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/1...