The Chronicle’s David Lazarus is a fine columnist and a great consumer advocate. But I can hardly agree with anything he says about the newspaper industry in his latest piece.

Lazarus uses Viacom’s lawsuit Tuesday against GooTube as a hook to talk about what ails newspapers, and suggests that charging readers for content might be one path forward.

There are several false premises here:

1. Newspapers are “giving away the store” online. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard this misconception, often from fellow journalists who should know better. Yes, most newspapers do not charge people to view their content online. No, that is not the same as giving it away for free. I’m assuming the Chronicle is getting some money for those BMW and Zipcar ads that run alongside Lazarus’ column. Online news sites are no more giving away their content than the many free weeklies (some of them profitable) that crowd for sidewalk space in many cities. Subscriptions have never accounted for a majority of a newspaper’s income. The money’s been in the ad dollars, and the same holds true online.

2. Newspapers “need to go after all the people making money off your content.” Lazarus points to aggregators that gather together news headlines and sell ads alongside them as opportunists stealing revenue from papers. There are, notably, a couple of media organizations that are complaining about the way that Google News and others republish their headlines. But the complainers are few and far between for a simple reason: Aggregators drive traffic to the original news source. Google News has become a key piece of the traffic equation for most news sites. People don’t want out of Google News, they want in. Case in point: The Merc recently redesigned its web site and broke all its RSS feeds in the process. When we realized that Yahoo was no longer pulling current headlines into its local news area, we didn’t cheer, we quickly set to find a fix. In the new world order, you push your content out to where the media consumers are, you don’t wait for them to come to you.

3. “As it stands, most newspapers treat the Internet in general and their own Web sites in particular as loss leaders that will somehow contribute to the overall enterprise, even though, in most cases, they’re little more than digital holes in the pocket.”

That may be true at the Chronicle, but it’s not from where I sit. The Internet is not an expensive, money-losing hobby. It’s a viable part of our future. I don’t see money jangling out of holey pockets down to sidewalks and rolling away. I see business models and content strategies evolving and growing. I see some papers where the online revenue is almost healthy enough to support a modest-sized online news operation.

Lazarus goes on to argue that papers should maybe charge for their content, maybe even collude with each other so that everyone bites the bullet simultaneously. With few exceptions, I think charging for content is a bad idea. I don’t think readers will accept it.

Lazarus’ column does make two valid points, and they are important. Unfortunately, they are given short shrift. Newspapers, according to journalism professor Philip Meyer, “need to invest in creation of the sort of unique content that readers (and Internet users) simply can’t find anywhere else.”

Bingo. It’s the content, baby. Give people what they want. Give them something of value. How simple is that?

Lazarus uses The NY Times’ Bill Keller to make the other point…”Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, told a reporter for his own newspaper in 2005 that it’s crucial to develop other sources of revenue online.”

Bingo, again. Media companies desperately need to diversify into other content and community areas. I could write a whole other blog post on that issue alone. But the point is, news alone is probably not going to pay for itself on the web.