Barbarians at the Gate, Publishers Seek Help

When the reeling newspaper industry sent its honchos to the Chicago O'Hare Hilton last week to discuss the future viability of the business, it sounded dramatic, desperate, perhaps even tragicomic.

(The writer who broke the news, former Chicago Tribune managing editor James Warren, likened the meeting -- sardonically -- to the infamous mafia conclave in Apalachin, New York, in 1957.)

Not surprisingly, speculation was rife among media watchers (and investors) about the details of the meeting's conversation. There seemed to be only one item on the agenda: how and when publishers might begin charging readers for online news -- and, indeed, how to sell audiences accustomed to free Internet content on the very idea of paywalls.

Now, however, as details of the meeting have emerged in the days since, it would seem that the majority of the minutes were given over to newspaper executives sitting in their seats and getting sold to.

At least three early-stage startup businesses sent their top salesman to Chicago to pitch executives on products intended to take the newspaper industry into the future -- but for a price.

There was Journalism Online, for instance, launched just weeks earlier by a trio of media-business heavyweights: Steve Brill (media entrepreneur and former journalist), Gordon Crovitz (a pre-Murdoch publisher of The Wall Street Journal) and Leo Hindrey (managing partner of InterMedia, a private equity firm that specializes in media investments).

Journalism Online is essentially a software platform that would help newspapers charge for online content, either with monthly or annual subscriptions, or with so-called micropayments, in which Internet readers pay by the article. Publishing companies would sign on, paying Brill and his cohorts a fee, or a percentage of their ad revenues.