Time magazine's cover story by Walter Isaacson --with its proposal for saving newspapers from a crisis of "meltdown proportions"--has bloggers buzzing. No more free content, the writer suggests (and, uh, you can view a version of the article for free at Time's own website and even more ironically, reposted for free under Isaacson's picture at Huffington Post.) Isaacson, a veteran print editor and now CEO of the Aspen Institute, says forsaking newsstand sales and subscriptions for an all-ad-supported model online was a terrible play for papers, admitting even he doesn't pay to read the New York Times anymore. "I still buy the paper. Thanks, Walter, for making me feel like a chump!" says Scott Rosenberg's WordYard. Isaacson proposes protecting content and charging online readers small fees. He has some useful ideas, but let the mocking begin! "Laughable," says Techdirt. "If most newspapers switch to micropayments, someone ...will create a new news site that doesn't charge."

Many have considered micropayments a dead issue since Clay Shirky's seminal trashing of the concept. If newspapers all simultaneously institute fees, it might be legally prohibited as a form of price fixing, suggests Screenwerk. Nerd Acumen doesn't even think the idea is possible: "While I don't condone piracy or copytheft of any kind, I do have two words for Mr. Isaacson: COPY, PASTE." Isaacson was on The Daily Show Monday night, where Jon Stewart wondered how you can get people to pay for somthing they've been getting free, says Daily Cartoonist (which takes the opportunity to embed prehistoric video of a 1981 newscast about people reading the San Francisco newspapers on their home computers.) Sadly, blogs Mathew Ingram at Nieman Lab, the idea that people will suddenly volunteer to pay the full freight for all of the great journalism that newspapers do is just wishful thinking. Rex Blog is just offended, as a loyal reader of free online content: "They're suggesting that my free-loading is why their product is failing." No Silence Here says free news won't go away: "I predict that journalists who lose their newspaper jobs are likely to continue practicing journalism to the extent their personal finances allow. People go into journalism because they want their voices heard. Being paid to have their voices heard was just a bonus." There are no easy answers in sight. Newspaper have dropped the ball on content, not charging for content, suggests Hitsville: "The truth was, [in the past] it didn't matter what they published. People just subscribed...For the ads, because they always had, some even for the news. Online, you have to publish stuff people want to read...That's the transition that's killing newspapers; it's something most reporters, editors and publishers never had to do."