Five months ago, a group of media executives including Steven Brill seemed to have the field to itself when it said it was building a system for newspapers to charge readers for access online.

Now, that group appears have a lot of company, like the News Corporation (NWS), led by Rupert Murdoch, and the technology giants Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and I.B.M. (IBM), whose interest was first reported this week.

But publishing executives and analysts caution against concluding that this proves there is a robust competition to develop such systems, or even that newspapers will rush to join any of the projects. The contributions of Google and some others are little more than a set of ideas, written up at the request of the Newspaper Association of America, which inadvertently made them public on its Web site.

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Google (GOOG), which is often in the crosshairs of newspaper publishers, thinks it can help newspaper companies get paid for their work.

The search giant is planning to upgrade its existing Google Checkout payment service to handle a broad suite of billing and subscription services targeted at premium content creators like newspapers, according to a memo the company recently submitted to the Newspaper Association of America.

The memo, which went online this week, responds to the NAA’s open request for new “paid content” solutions earlier this summer. It was first spotted by the Nieman Journalism Lab.

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The newspaper industry should be sobered by Martin Langeveld’s calculations, based on the Newspaper Association of America’s misplaced bragging about Nielsen internet data, that only about a half one one percent of time spent online is spent on newspaper sites.

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Apparently there was a big meeting of news executives today in Chicago under the auspices of the Newspaper Association of America. The de jure name for the topic at hand was “Models to Monetize Content” but the de facto subject of the conclave seems to be building paywalls and ending what James Warren glibly calls “the age of content theft.”

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The Newspaper Association of America is meeting in San Diego this week and they’re preaching up at their own choir loft with angry, self-righteous fire and brimstone about their plight. Today, Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt will address them, but he’ll be polite because that’s the way he is and because there’ll be a few hundred aging but armed publishers with blunderbusses aimed at his heart.

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Last year was a “banner year” for U.S. newspaper Web sites, an industry association announced in a recent press release, headlined, “Online Newspaper Viewership Reaches Record in 2007.” The Newspaper Association of America also noted that the fourth quarter set a record for any quarter since the group started tracking online audience, in 2004, and October set a monthly record. But placed in the context of an overall increase in Americans’ online usage, newspapers’ electronic march forward looks a lot slower. More people are spending more time loading more Web pages, lifting the boats of lots of online categories.

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