Free on the Web is one thing --Flickr for pictures, Slate for news analysis, Craigslist for classifieds -- but taking free into the offline world of paper, delivery and vendors means scale, the grail of the race for eyeballs, and that adds to expense. If a Web site achieves a growing audience, it simply beefs up servers and serves up more ads. If a free print product catches on, its publisher has to deal with beefy union delivery drivers and serving up more expensively milled dead trees.

And it has to deal with something else: consumers who value its publication at exactly zero dollars and zero cents. During the dot-com delirium, many people fondly quoted Stewart Brand, the founder of The Well and The Whole Earth Catalogue, saying "Information wants to be free."

Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired magazine (newsstand price: $4.95) who is writing a book about media consumption titled "The Long Tail," reminded me that people always leave out the second part of that quote: "Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy and recombine -- too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away."

And it has not. Many print publications -- magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Economist, along with newspapers like The Wall Street Journal -- require their readers to plunk down real money to access their contents. It may or may not cover costs, but it is meaningful revenue in more ways than one.

Part of the reason some traditional media cling to charging is that the revenues derived from consumers have symbolic significance -- what the author Rafi Mohammed, in his book "The Art of Pricing," called "the belief of value."

Magazines that use subscription and newsstand purchases as an index of "wantedness" typically pay more to acquire readers than they collect, which makes little economic sense. But paid content addresses the issue of time poverty, the real challenge of contemporary print media. If they buy it, the thinking goes, they will read it.

Right now, consumers, especially younger ones, believe that they have already paid. A family of five, and we are not naming names here, spends $4,000 a year to access broadband, cellphone and cable coverage and would be fools to pay more. Yes, pay for the pipes and what goes through them, but not a penny more. Traditional media has to make a case -- perhaps by starting small, as iTunes did at 99 cents a song -- that some things in the pipe are worth spending for, too.