The map is not always clear

As the inimitable Yogi Berra once said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

The question, of course, is which fork to take.

In our case, we're taking the same fork as The Wall Street Journal.

American newspapers, confronted with the disruption posed by the Internet, have been staring at a fork in the road for some time.

For a while, it didn't even look like a fork at all. Instead, it resembled little more than dozens of little paths leading off to various parts of the forest.

But these days, it has boiled down to a choice.

One fork is the one chosen by The New York Times and the Gannett newspapers among others.

The other fork is the one chosen by The Wall Street Journal and papers as different as the Bloomington Herald-Times, The New Castle Courier-Journal, the Columbus, Ohio, Post-Dispatch, and The Commercial Review.

It's still too early to say which path is the smartest one to follow, but I can at least let you know why we chose the one we did and why we think it makes the most sense.

The New York Times and Gannett fork is the one selected by most metropolitan daily newspapers in the U.S.

It's predicated on the assumption that the best way to make money selling advertising on the Internet is to grab as many "eyeballs," as many page views as possible. The best way to do that, the argument goes, is to give your news product away for free and update it hourly or even quicker.

Certainly, those sites have been able to attract an audience. If you're giving stuff away for free, it's easy to get people through the doors. But it's far from clear whether enough revenue will be generated by Internet advertising to pay the freight.

And then there are the ads themselves. Pop-ups are an irritant. So are ads full of animation, if you're trying to read a news article. And ads placed above or smack dab in the middle of news content seem, at least to me, to undermine credibility.

The Wall Street Journal fork seems to make more sense.

It's predicated on a belief that the people who are paying today for the news content provided by the print product - you folks who are subscribers - should not have to subsidize free access to news for others.

Subscribe to The Commercial Review, and you automatically have access to the daily newspaper's content via the Web as well as by home delivery. It becomes an enhancement to your existing subscription.

But if you're paying for it, why should we give it away to anyone else?

We've been looking at this fork in the road for a couple of years now, and we've come to the conclusion that it's the best - and fairest - solution.

In the past, we hesitated to update the Web site daily because we didn't want to give our news product away. Now that it's linked to the subscriber database, there's an incentive not only to update it daily but to add new features like local video, which should be showing up as soon as this summer.

The hardest part, which delayed the switch from a casually-updated free site to a daily-updated site for subscribers, was figuring out the logistics involved in uploading our subscriber database to our Web host on a regular basis. (I know it sounds boring, and it was. But it was the essential piece of the puzzle.)

Now that the transition has been made, we believe that the quality and depth of offerings available on The CR's Web site will continue to grow dramatically.

And why shouldn't they? After all, we'll be adding things to the site for you, our most loyal customers.

Newspapers, by the way, are not dying.

They're changing.

And this new fork we've committed to is evidence of that. CR subscribers will be seeing significant new benefits in the months and years ahead.

As to whether the fork we've chosen makes more sense than the other one, the giving-it-away-for-free fork, only time will tell.

But two things strike me as significant: One hour after The CR's new Web site went live we had our first on-line subscriber. And a day after the site went live, a guy by the name of Rupert Murdoch gave a speech in Washington saying that newspapers need to charge for access to their news on the Internet.

You may have heard of Rupert Murdoch.

He owns The Wall Street Journal.[[In-content Ad]]