'Free lunches' at newspaper Web sites may be coming to an end

ALBANY, N.Y. — Trite sayings tend to be grounded in reality. A familiar phrase — "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," for example — comes from experience.

So let's consider this one: "There is no free lunch." There's some sense in my business that while we've been defying that for a bit, this rebellion against reality may be about to end.

People ask me all the time how newspapers expect to survive if people can get the same information free online that costs them 75 cents a day on the newsstand. Set aside the embedded expense of buying a computer and paying a monthly fee to the Internet service provider. For years, newspapers have charged people for their product on one side of the street and given it away on the other.

Now, the growing buzz in the communication industry suggests that those days are winding down. Many experts predict that consumers increasingly will recognize differences between the content they can get for free and what they might be willing to pay for.

It's already clear to discerning Web users that the online product and the printed versions of most newspapers, including the Times Union, aren't the same. It's not that one is better than the other; they're simply different.

Online offers blogs with wide-ranging points of view, searchable archives, vast photo galleries, video clips with many stories and links to content worldwide that might interest you. On the Web, you choose what you want to see.

Print gives you a compact and portable selection of news, commentary and features, with a discernible hierarchy of value assigned by editors. Since you don't define what's in the paper, you're more likely to stumble across something fascinating that might not have been in your expected range of reading.

Throughout the last decade, as the Internet emerged as an important source of information, almost every newspaper moved to offer online consumers free access to the output of newsrooms. If they hadn't, other news providers would have seized that growing market. The few local papers that tried to charge consumers for online content lost market share.

This move to the Web established newspapers as the leading local online news source in most communities. But it had a downside: Part of the circulation decline affecting every newspaper is clearly attributable to us competing with us. Here, most users of timesunion.com also read the paper, but some have switched from print to Web exclusively.