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My guess is that news content will be paid for in the long term. The thing about news is that it's new - there isn't time to "pirate" it, and people don't want to faff about collating everything or trying to work out what to believe. They want a trusted source that will tell them the kind of news that they want (Sun/Grauniad/Torygraph/Mail/Hello/whatever), in a way that reinforces their prejudices, in a convenient package. I think that people will see value in this in the long term.
Early on, newspapers were competing for a presence on the web, in the context of the early madness around investing in the internet for incredible future returns that never materialised. As a result, they all adopted a free model which is difficult to back down on now. The increasingly popular format of a book-sized device that you can carry around (such as ereaders, netbooks and ipads) presents a new opportunity for newspapers, I think, because people don't see this as simply a browser. If they can deliver a convenient, pleasant-to-read newspaper to such devices, they will probably be able to charge for it.
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