There was a dinner Wednesday and, according to the agenda, Thursday begins with a quick declaration of goals at 8 a.m., then an 8:10 a.m. session labeled, "Fair Syndication Consortium/Attributor." It's described as a "presentation on technology/service to track content on the Web and to extract payments from third-parties and ad networks that have appropriated newspaper content."

Presumably, Google, Yahoo! and any one of thousands of websites could, and should, get mentioned with scant reverence. Perhaps the age of content theft is coming to an end.

That first session is followed by "Journalism Online: Presentation on proposed service to charge for access to newspaper content and to license that content that (sic) online aggregators" (the assistance of at least one of the many copy editors sent packing by the attendees might have been sought).

That presentation would seem quite important, with many conflicting ideas floating about whether charging will work and how to even try. The stark reality is that the industry will have to soon start demanding payment for at least some of its online handiwork.

There are various ways to go about it, and one size won't fit all. During their days of print advertising plenty, the people in this room, or their predecessors, made the catastrophic, myopic decision to not charge. They gave away their expensive efforts for free. They by and large misjudged the significance of the internet.

It's now safe to wager that most attendees, who were scheduled to include Michael Golden of the New York Times, Gary Pruitt of McClatchy and Tom Curley of the Associated Press, will be dragged into charging for at least some online content. Cross one's fingers that a dirty little industry secret, namely the qualitative decline of many papers (the New York Times a notable exception) amid rampant cost-cutting, doesn't now give even long-loyal consumers legitimate pause about paying up.

Ultimately, many in attendance will start charging for some online content because they don't know what else to do.

They will listen to a session titled, "Aggregating User Data: Collecting enhanced online newspaper user data across newspaper properties and mining that data to aggressively sell target content to specific audience segments across the network (e.g. golf enthusiasts)." Hey, perhaps an industry largely inept at creative marketing will corral Tiger Woods, or other cultural icons, as spokesmen. They could do worse.

There will be a "discussion about content models" and, then, lunch. The afternoon brings a session on the disastrous decline in classified advertising and, finally, talk of "Next steps" before most folks scoot to O'Hare and home.

I suspect some at this de facto summit were, at best, passable managers while times were flush but never really cut out to think on their feet. There are a few leading executives who come from the considerably easier realms of television and radio, where they made lots of money and then got promoted to oversee the far more complicated organisms of newspapers at their multi-media corporations.