The paid content opportunity is greatest if the content is unique, actionable, targeted at a relevant niche, frequently updated and from a credible or trusted source. Availability of free alternatives can be a limiting factor, but not the determining factor - there are barrel-loads of free content about wine, for example, but plenty of people are nevertheless willing to pay FT wine columnist Jancis Robinson £69 a year for her unique expertise.

In reality, there are few news organisations that are retreating entirely behind a closed paywall - the prevalent model is some form of freemium. It’s important to get the balance right, but if this is done then it’s entirely possible to run a content website that benefits from a mix of revenue streams, maintains its links and its visibility on the web, and remains important to the online conversation.

In this context, therefore, all the bombast against paywalls is oversimplified, misleading and a waste of energy. Rather than rejecting any revenue model outright, media executives should be thinking about how to get the balance right.

Rather than piling on to criticise The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) for announcing a paid content initiative that will not even begin until next year, the pundits ought to be wishing them success. Rather than sniggering disingenuously at Newsday’s 35 paid online subscribers, analysts ought to explain how Newsday’s strategy really works, with the vast majority of their home market able to access the website for free.

When executives, consultants and bloggers rail simplisticly against so-called “paywalls”, it seems they must believe that news organisations have nothing to offer that people will pay for online. While it’s true that newspapers can’t expect to shovel the same old print product online and get paid for it, do these doubters really mean to imply that they consider themselves and their industry to be incapable of creating online products that people will pay for? Really?

It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course - the longer media executives resist and condemn strategies such as paid content, the more their long-term prospects will erode and the less capability they will retain. At this rate, for example, The Guardian is on a path to losing so much of its talent that it may neither be able to create new revenue-generating content nor to sustain its role as a leader in society’s open conversation.

Even Jeff Jarvis has recently softened years of bombastic opposition by acknowledging, albeit grudgingly, that it might be possible for newspapers to figure out a way to make some money from paid content. Maybe we’re getting somewhere… 

With their knowledge of their subject areas and their array of journalistic talent, newspapers ought to be amongst the most capable of creating new content in new forms for new business models. That’s what makes it so sad and shameful to see some newspaper executives closing their minds and throwing in the towel.

And that’s why it’s so important for us to applaud, and learn from, those executives who are willing to experiment with paid content and other new models. Instead of frantically clinging to the status quo, they are the healers who are working to get their organisations out of intensive care and back on their feet.

Because there is still time to save this patient. But the patient must want to be saved.