Paul Graham has a lengthy article on Web 2.0 up; I liked the article, and it's well worth reading in its entirety. I wanted to pick out a few segments that really resonated with me. First, on "Democracy" and the web:

The second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy. We now have several examples to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system to channel their efforts. Wikipedia may be the most famous. Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical point: it's good enough. And it's free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can't link to them. They're not part of the conversation.

I've said that about WikiPedia before, and it's true about a lot of things on the web. Graham makes an even better point about content that lives behind a pay wall on the web:

On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can't link to them. They're not part of the conversation.

Which is what's happened to the New York Times since they created "TimesSelect". No one links to them (for that matter, few people link to Salon, either). The ironic thing about the approach taken by the Times is that they've decided that you should pay for the commodity material - opinions (whether it's politics, sports, food, theater, whatever). I don't know whether the Times has noticed, but the web is awash in opinion content. The kicker is - their columnists just aren't good enough to warrant payment. It's not just them; almost no one is. Graham nails this in his piece:

My experience of writing for magazines suggests an explanation. Editors. They control the topics you can write about, and they can generally rewrite whatever you produce. The result is to damp extremes. Editing yields 95th percentile writing-- 95% of articles are improved by it, but 5% are dragged down. 5% of the time you get "throngs of geeks."

On the web, people can publish whatever they want. Nearly all of it falls short of the editor-damped writing in print publications. But the pool of writers is very, very large. If it's large enough, the lack of damping means the best writing online should surpass the best in print. [3] And now that the web has evolved mechanisms for selecting good stuff, the web wins net. Selection beats damping, for the same reason market economies beat centrally planned ones.

That's the problem that sites like the Times and Salon are raging against - there's simply too much "good enough" (not to mention the occasional really good) stuff out there. Why pay for opinion pieces? The funny thing is, The Times has something of value that the mass of the web can't do - actual news reporting. Anyone can do analysis and opinion mongering (not necessarily well, but you get my point) - but the Times is one of the few organizations with real global reach. They have (either directly or by agreement) people "on the ground" nearly everywhere - if an event (like the east asian earthquake, for instance) takes place, they can get news out faster than nearly anyone else. Meaning, that content actually has value. I don't know that they can charge for it, but they should certainly be able to command premium ad rates for it.