Steven Brill launched American Lawyer magazine, Court TV, Brill's Content and those airport security fast-passes. Now he wants to help newspapers broker their online content. Clue: Smarter people already offer that.

Michael Kinsley tried making readers pay for news. Didn't work!

Micropayments are the future of content! If I had a nickel for every time I heard that one. Walter Isaacson, a former managing editor of Time, is the latest to pick up this tired banner.

Charging for content generates disdain, or worse, disinterest among Web users. When so much news and entertainment is freely available, the idea of getting charged for any of it seems like nothing more than corporate greed. But advertising-hating journalists, who dream of getting paid directly by readers, keep bringing up the idea. Dan Mitchell writes in his latest column that Internet users are slowly being conditioned to accept micropayments. The most noticeable example is our willingness to purchase songs off iTunes for 99 cents a pop. The argument is that we're willing to pay for things that we view as valuable — mainly music and videos, not, alas, the written word. So much for the dreams of ink-stained wretches.