When the cost of printing collapses (to use the expression from Clay Shirky), the barrier to entry disappears, and the value derived from scarcity disappears with it.
AP's scheme amounts to a technical and/or legal attempt to reimpose an artificial scarcity so it can once again sell at a premium.
Their scheme is doomed.
That's only a problem if your business model depends on users paying for these things - i.e. if your business model depends on scarcity that doesn't exist.
If they would only stop being precious for a minute, the newsmedia would recognize that they're already familiar with the idea of making money from sources other than the actual content consumers. After all, it was newspapers that popularized the revenue-from-advertising model in the first place, a model that allowed them to deliver newspapers very cheaply (sometimes freely) to their readers.
The smartest thing AP and other newsmedia can do is abandon their micropayment pipe dreams and start getting creative about new ways to leverage their assets for revenue.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/01062009/business/front_page_new...
That means either:
1) the corporate newsmedia will come up with some new revenue stream by discovering or developing some new source of value from their assets, or
2) they will fail.
Look at Google. They started out as a search company. With no real idea how to generate revenue, they came up with a way to aggregate hyperlinks across websites to produce surprisingly helpful page results for keyword searches.
It was the gargantuan data set they managed to accumulate over the course of indexing the internet and generating search results that finally gave them the revenue stream they needed.
Google is now an advertising company. They generate revenue by selling contextual advertising embedded in web pages (they get website owners to agree to this advertising by sharing some of their revenue).
That's a profoundly creative way of leveraging assets to generate revenue by providing a scarce, valuable service: scarce because only Google has the infrastructure, data, analytical expertise and market reach to provide it; and valuable because advertisers gain more revenue from increased sales than it costs them to buy Google ads.
The newsmedia, until now, have been mainly in the advertising business, in which the exercise of gathering, reporting and distributing the news served as a mechanism for attracting advertising revenue (in much the same way that indexing the internet and providing search results is Google's mechanism for attracting advertising revenue).
The media were never particularly in the business of selling the news to their readers. Their customers were advertisers, not readers; and what they sold was not news but the eyeballs of their readers.
That business model is now dying. Some media firms - either existing firms that can change their stripes or some new firm that discovers and exploits an opportunity - will find a new business model in which they sell something scarce and valuable to someone willing to pay for it.
Again, those media firms that fail to do this will fail.
If you've got an hour or so, there's a really entertaining lecture by Cory Doctorow on the HN front page right now:
The problem that news companies suffer that makes this a significantly different problem for them rather than a company like the RIAA is that journalists get paid by the company as a primary source of income, journalists have to get sent places which costs the company money, and the company's primary source of revenue is the output of the journalists. For a second lets forget print media ever existed, in the current state of the web where media such as this is demanded by users to be free this is a failing business because of extravagant costs, and almost no profits. Why print media is a failing is because less people buy print and more people read it online.
There are players who beat the market by having a niche audience, low costs, and a high price, ie the Economist. Unlike the NY Times or AP they didn't have to send several photographers and journalists to China several times for pre, during, and post Olympics. While I don't necessarily agree with this business model, an exchange of cash has to exist somewhere, finding where such an exchange is most acceptable is a another story.