Your average journalist usually begins his career with a pop, like a big bottle of champagne. He effervesces about his profession, intoxicating all who encounter him. The party goes on for years as the young journalist conquers deadlines, corrupt politicians, and hidebound editors.

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As Mark Gimein noted last week in The Big Money, the media giants have put the Web’s journalistic “parasites”–blogs, aggregators, Google (GOOG)–on notice that they will no longer allow them to pinch their copy without reimbursement. The Associated Press has threatened legal action against thieves of its intellectual property, MediaNews executive (and AP Chairman) Dean Singleton has seconded that threat, and News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch and Robert Thomson, the top editor of News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal, growl in harmony.

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The idea that people won’t pay for content online has become such a part of the Web orthodoxy that New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller risked getting lynched earlier this month for merely musing about paid models for the online editions of his paper. Not helping Keller’s cogitation was a contemporaneous “secret memo” from Steve Brill and a Time article by Walter Isaacson, both which advocated variations on the micropayment model. Neither advances the topic much beyond what most Web entrepreneurs understood long ago.

Paid content’s failures are well-documented. Slate gave up on the subscriber model in early 1999. The New York Times folded its TimesSelect product of columnists and archives in 2007, concluding a two-year run, even though it was taking in $10 million a year. The latimes.com set free its CalendarLive section of arts, reviews, and listings in May 2005 after a 21-month paid experiment. To name another ambitious venture among the many, the 2000 start-up Inside.com, which charged several hundred dollars a year, failed to attract its 30,000 desired subscribers and expired.

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We’ve finally reached the point at which some of the finest minds doing the biggest thinking about the battered news business believe the best eraser for red ink is… charity.

Although they weren’t the first to make the pitch for newspapers on the dole, financial pros David Swensen, the chief investment officer at Yale, and his colleague Michael Schmidt gave the idea a boost last week in a New York Times op-ed. They posit that the best way to maintain the quality journalism of, say, the New York Times, would be to retool it as a nonprofit and run it from the proceeds of a $5 billion endowment.

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A moment of sympathy, please, for newspapers, whose readers and advertisers have been fleeing at a frightening rate.

It would be easy to accuse editors and publishers of being clueless about the coming Internet disruption and to insist that the industry’s proper reward for decades of haughty attitude, bad planning, and incompetence is bankruptcy.

But newspapers have really, really tried to wrap their hands around the future and preserve their franchise, an insight I owe to Pablo J. Boczkowski’s 2004 book, Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers. The industry has understood from the advent of AM radio in the 1920s that technology would eventually be its undoing and has always behaved accordingly.

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