The problem is that they have tried that. It doesn't work because web advertising is significantly cheaper than print advertising is, especially because you cannot guarantee that someone has seen the advert on the web. Which is why they're currently losing money. A full page ad in the NY times on the cover is 75,000$ or 100,000$ depending on the day, one could only dream of making that kind of money on web adverts.
The trick is to get creative about finding new sources of value in their assets. Maybe the answer isn't merely more advertising, but finding new revenue streams in addition to straight ad sales. Given that people flat-out won't pay for online news. the newsmedia have no other choice.
At this point you'd have to suggest a solution, because I cannot get what you're hinting at. If you can't my point original point is evident: the news agencies are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I'm not actually hinting at anything. I simply don't know what the solution will look like. What I do know is that micropayments from readers do not work and will not work.
That means either:
1) the corporate newsmedia will come up with some new revenue stream by discovering or developing some new source of value from their assets, or
2) they will fail.
Look at Google. They started out as a search company. With no real idea how to generate revenue, they came up with a way to aggregate hyperlinks across websites to produce surprisingly helpful page results for keyword searches.
It was the gargantuan data set they managed to accumulate over the course of indexing the internet and generating search results that finally gave them the revenue stream they needed.
Google is now an advertising company. They generate revenue by selling contextual advertising embedded in web pages (they get website owners to agree to this advertising by sharing some of their revenue).
That's a profoundly creative way of leveraging assets to generate revenue by providing a scarce, valuable service: scarce because only Google has the infrastructure, data, analytical expertise and market reach to provide it; and valuable because advertisers gain more revenue from increased sales than it costs them to buy Google ads.
The newsmedia, until now, have been mainly in the advertising business, in which the exercise of gathering, reporting and distributing the news served as a mechanism for attracting advertising revenue (in much the same way that indexing the internet and providing search results is Google's mechanism for attracting advertising revenue).
The media were never particularly in the business of selling the news to their readers. Their customers were advertisers, not readers; and what they sold was not news but the eyeballs of their readers.
That business model is now dying. Some media firms - either existing firms that can change their stripes or some new firm that discovers and exploits an opportunity - will find a new business model in which they sell something scarce and valuable to someone willing to pay for it.
Again, those media firms that fail to do this will fail.
If you've got an hour or so, there's a really entertaining lecture by Cory Doctorow on the HN front page right now:
http://www.nypost.com/seven/01062009/business/front_page_new...