Newsday recently announced that they are going to start withholding some of their newspapers' stories from being printed free on their sites, so they can charge for content. Hearst newspapers say they will be following suit and enacting a pay-wall for their web material. Hey, the Wall Street Journal already sort of does this*, and they haven't gone out of business yet!

The problem with charging for digital content is that it really only works if everyone does it. That means all news sources, wire services and, yup, even blogs, because why pay for an "exclusive" item that you can read for free somewhere else? Below, we look at five types of content we'd actually pay money to see.

Really, Really Exclusive Exclusives

The National Enquirer works used to work as a great model for this. By keeping their big stories off the web and only in the print edition, people know where the story is coming from. Unfortunately, most people are too lazy/ashamed to go out and buy TNE at their local grocers, so they're content to peruse the Gawker summary and scanned pics of John Edwards' sex scandal. No wonder AMI and David Pecker are totally broke. Ironically, if The National Enquirer had put those photos of Rielle Hunter and her secret baby online, but charged a one-time membership fee to see it, we may have gladly forked over the cash. Hey, the broken clocks over at AMI are right at least twice a decade, might as well keep yourself in the loop.

Multimedia

Likewise, if TMZ charged for their video coverage and pap pics, Harvey Levin could make a killing off of his "exclusives." Less reliance on dwindling advertisers = good! The problem is, most videos are currently too easy to rip and place on YouTube, so most brands won't run the risk of making their product un-embeddable. This is where newspapers could take a cue from the porn world: Give people short "teaser" clips to watch for free, and if they want the whole product, they have to pony up the bucks.

Celebrity Op-Eds

Funnily enough, the one website that really utilizes the celebrities-as-writers technique is The Huffington Post, which exists as either a communist or fascist community (depending on whether you are one of Arianna's fans or unpaid writers). But one thing you can say for the Queen Bee: she's egalitarian. Arianna doesn't fork over the dough to more famous people, either, even though they undoubtedly bring more readers on her site. They do it for free out of their misguided sense of duty as celebrities to tell the world what they think of national politics. But the thing is, people would pay to read Alec Baldwin's opinion about being gang-raped by Sandra Day O'Connor. Lord knows why—chalk it up to the nation's obsession with celebrity culture, but they will. If the "free" version of The Huffington Post contained everything but Paul Reiser's view on Rush Limbaugh (surprise: he's not a fan!), would people pay extra to read it? You'd be surprised. Plus, Op-Eds are really the only pieces of a newspaper than you can rationalize charging for: Objective journalism and "straight" news can come from anywhere, but if your publication is the only one with Lindsay Lohan giving commentary, people might actually pay for it.

The Absence of Celebrity Op-Eds

Actually, we would pay to not see Fall Out Boy's bassist's mug next to a poorly written editorial about Barack Obama, so if there is anyway we could hand over 10 dollars a month and have Huffpost and Daily Beast wiped clean of these self-indulgent rants, there is probably a market for that, too.

Brand Name Information

Former San Francisco Chronicle editor, Chicago Sun-Times editor and current Silicone Valley CEO Alan D. Mutter writes on his blog Reflections of a Newsosaur:

U.S. News and World Report sells access to school rankings and other detailed college data. Consumer Reports gets paid for rating refrigerators. Congressional Quarterly sells high-priced, inside-the-Beltway dope. The New Yorker makes money off reprints of its cartoons. Millions are spent on Kindle books, iPhone applications and even ring tones.

When he goes on to mention the Wall Street Journal's success with the pay-for-content model, he credits it to "original, authoritative reporting and the power of its brand." And while we may not agree that the Journal provides more "original" reporting than say, The Times, Mutter is right that there are some types of information that can't as easily disseminate across the web: statistics, scientific studies, local news, rankings of anything other than sports teams. Having a one-stop source to access this kind of information is worth its weight in Internet gold.

In the end, people will only cough up the dough for something either extremely sensationalist or something extremely dependable. If you manage to market your brand to fill that niche, then congratulations, you are officially Newsweek.

* Wall Street Journal charges for membership, but if you Google the first couple words in the article it will link you to the article for free. This is because not even Rupert Murdoch would ever deny those valuable Google-brought pageviews. It's an annoying extra step, but technically you can still read the WSJ for free.