Good thoughts from Pat Thornton on how news organizations – newspapers in particular – should frame their thinking about trying to charge for the delivery of news online.

A couple of salient bullet points:

• You can’t charge for something that has been free for years without drastically improving it
• It’s much easier to charge for a new product or feature that was never freely available
• Even if a news org develops products & content worth paying for, it still needs plenty of good, free content

Read Thornton’s entire post.