Will charging for content save newspapers?

The Associated Press is taking a stand that Web site users and Internet companies that use their work should get their permission and share the money with them. If they don't, they are threatening legal action.

I want to applaud this action but it's so late in the day that it also makes me want to throw my hands up in disgust. Can they stop a trend that record producers and nearly everybody else in the universe has found impossible to control? It seems almost impossible. They let the genie out of the bottle when they offered it free to begin with and it's always hard to get that genie back into the bottle later on.

As the Newsosaur blog points out, the hunt for offenders could turn into a ridiculous and futile chase that he compares to the Keystone cops. That's because there's no good way to find offenders and punish them. It may come down to the kind of enforcement effort seen in the music publishing industry that made examples of several illegal downloads, including some children, but did not nothing to stave the unending flow of illegal downloads.

On the other hand, newspapers and news organizations have to find a way to make money on the Internet or they most assuredly are doomed. Since the Associated Press is owned by newspapers, it could be one way to get more revenue. The New York Times tried a paid service years ago and I was one of those people shelling out 99 cents per article. But it apparently never made money.

The new policy seems to be aimed mostly at Google which is both the angel that brings people to news sites and the devil that may be profiting from the hard work of all those reporters and editors out there.

I want it to work. I really do. I want something to work. I'm just not sure this is the answer.