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The Philadelphia Inquirer will hold back much of its content from the Web until it has appeared in print, says Mike Leary, managing editor, in a memo to staff picked up by Romenesko.

Jeff Jarvis, already on a roll on the subject of curmudgeons, declares Leary's decree "suicide." To Steve Outing, it is simply a "discouraging" step backward.

In 13 years doing "interactive stuff," I've read and heard plenty of pundits declaring that media entities must fight to establish a value for their online content above the baseline, which is free. Or, unable to accomplish that feat, they should simply board up their online efforts and make a stand with offline distribution only.

I get the motivation for edicts like this, looking at the business, just not the logic or the corner of the building from which the Philly mandates come.

I could see a certain Mr. Tierney imposing this form of protectionism, designed to shield the still-higher values of ad adjacencies in print from the price destruction and unbundling of those adjacencies online.

In response, I could certainly imagine a frustrated senior editor demanding to know why the business-side leadership of the company has not found a way to make a fair online buck off the best work of good journalists.

But I cannot understand how a senior editor can encourage, or feel good about, print protectionism. It's like saying the public's right to know can wait, now even must wait as a matter of news organization policy, until our cash registers ring.

Embargo-for-print policies seemed silly enough when we had to do it just to keep our stories off the late local newscasts. Now newspapers face the flagrant competitive threat of local broadcasters breaking news aggressively on their Web sites, and the more subtle competition from establishing on-air personalities' happy, helpful presence online. Later: Cory Bergman says the Inquirer edict is a great opportunity for Philly TV stations.

How can anyone believe that consumers pick up the nuances of print protectionism, or will respond favorably (if at all) to it? Who wants to write that marketing tagline?

"The Inquirer. News worth waiting for."

"Today's news tomorrow, only in The Inquirer."

"Get The Inquirer. They aren't facts unless you pay for them."

"Read The Inquirer. News looks better in ink than pixels."

"The Inquirer. It's news. Well marinated."

Update (7:40 a.m. EDT, 8/8/2008): Howard Owens says the Inquirer edict not only makes sense, it doesn't go far enough to distinguish the print editions from the interactive service.

Owens gets credit for revolutionary thinking. I get it, as an ideal, but I don't in practice. Here's why:

• No matter what we want our newspaper.coms to be, consumers tell us, show us repeatedly in user testing that they expect it -- first and foremost -- to reproduce the contents of the printed newspaper in full. In fact, some recoil from it if they sense it does not represent print to this extent.
• Owens says it's fine to hold back print content as long as the journalists also work under a mandate to ensure a high quality Web site. Just as I do not believe most print-conditioned sales reps can add online to their Swiss-army-knife presentations, I doubt print journalists working under a protectionist policy, in stripped-down news organizations to boot, will exert much brainpower for their Web sites.

That said, if I invented local newspaper organizations from scratch, the interactive teams would be part of a separate division, with separate P&L, that purchased rights to the full corpus of content from the primary news organization and then chose when, where and how to redistribute it online.

Under separate management, the Web team could also determine whether to create its own content or buy from other sources (consumers, even competitors) to ensure the best reports and best communities around them.