They’re having it in almost every city and town that has a newspaper with a Web site.

The Content Conversation has many facets, many layers, many nuances and variables. But The Conversation, taking place all over the country, is about just one thing: charging for content online that has until now been free. "We are discussing the issue of cash for content," said Ralph Frattura, new-media manager of The Sacramento Bee.

"Like everyone else in our business, it seems we are taking another look at the revenue model," said Richard Core, editor of latimes.com.

Any way you slice it, you can’t walk out of a supermarket without paying for a loaf of bread. Now for the first time since newspapers gleefully – and, in retrospect naively – bought into the Internet mantra "Information wants to be free," putting a price on content is on the table.

In fact, Medial General Inc. plans to begin charging subscription fees for some of its newspaper Web sites by the end of the year, according to President, Chairman, and CEO J. Stewart Bryan III, who called free access to newspaper Web sites "dumb."

"We’ve come to the conclusion that [paid online subscription] is the model to follow," Bryan told Editor &Publisher magazine. "We’ve got to stop giving things away on the Web." Bryan said no specific plan for online fees had been established, and declined to say if all of Media General’s daily papers would institute subscriptions at the same time. But he said recent company research had shown that readers were leaving print newspapers for free Web products. "There is a direct relationship between hits on the Web increasing and decline in paid circulation," Bryan said.

Media General owns 25 daily newspapers, including its hometown Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune, and the Winston Salem (N.C.) Journal, as well as nearly 100 weeklies and 25 TV stations.

"Page views we get now are high, but there’s not a lot of revenue attached to it," Journal General Manager Pat Taylor said. "We are giving away on the Web what we are trying to sell in print."

Only a handful of newspapers charge for online subscriptions, with The Wall Street Journal the lone major daily requiring a fee.

Among most newspapers the content conversation is still more talk than action since no one really has a business plan.

Ideas include subscription fees similar to the print model, enhanced "value added" online packages, and determining specific areas of content that people will pay for.

"You will see it going to a subscription model targeting premium customers paying for premium content, with very good customer service and a focused product," said Peggy Smyth, a partner in Andersen (formeryl Arthur Andersen) and a media industry consultant.