Macworld — Should Steve Jobs introduce Apple's (AAPL) tablet (the iPad, iSlate, iTablet, or perhaps iBook) at the company's press event on Wednesday, the device will likely contain a number of features: users will be able to play games on it, surf the Web, read e-books, and much more. But perhaps the most important feature it may contain will be the ability to save the press from its demise.

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At the end of a failed 15-year experiment in giving away its product, the press (newspapers and magazines) has begun to renounce free. It's slow in starting, because of the inertia of this decade and a half, but the New York Times announced recently that it would begin charging for its Website, and others are sure to follow. (In fact, this was a huge game of chicken, where U.S. newspapers wanted to start charging for their content, but none wanted to be the first to take the leap.) But payment for Websites alone won't be enough to change newspapers' and magazines' bottom lines from red to black. Apple's tablet, however, will.

The end of free

It's time for free to end. Newspapers and magazines made the mistake, in the early days of the Web, of giving away their content for free, in exchange for revenue from Web advertising. (One could argue that this is not exactly free for users, given the annoyance they have to put up with.) While this may have been viable for a few years, everyone now knows that Web ads simply don't work. In the early days of the Web, people clicked on banner ads because they were new; but they quickly just became a nuisance, and now everyone ignores them.

In the past few years, tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, and newspapers and magazines are cutting back and folding all across the U.S. For example, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, shut down in early 2009, used to have more than 200,000 weekday readers, and a half-million Sunday readers; now you can't even wrap fish with it. Gourmet magazine had nearly a million monthly readers, and you can no longer cook fish with it.

Yet we need the press: the fourth estate is a necessary check for our government and business. As long as free thrives, the press can't do its job correctly. Free may be good for freeloaders, but it's bad for society. Those who want things to be free forget that there are still people doing the work they get for nothing, and those people need to be paid. As the old saw goes, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. (And, please, spare me the comments about how free will lead to other forms of income; this has been tried, and has been a massive failure, with only rare exceptions such as Google. (GOOG))

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