I've had a lot to say about this over the years, and there's more coming. But I want to set the record straight here. Pete Croatto writes, "The Mercury News would become widely regarded as the first newspaper to put its entire content online, initially for free. The decision established a lasting expectation that online news should be free." It did not. What created that expectation was that, on the internet (in contrast to closed commercial services like AOL) everything was free. You paid for your own computer, and you paid for your own internet access (or maybe your institution did), and then, you shared your content with everyone else. It's important to understand that you don't actually need commercial content to make the web work. You don't even need to pay for content production. People will create their own content, including news content, for free.
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