The newspaper business model is in trouble, and news veteran Joel Brinkley offered up an idea in his San Francisco Chronicle column on how to save it.

"Imagine a company that sells you a product each day - while at the same time that company produces an enhanced version of the same product and gives it away, hours earlier, for free. How long would you continue buying that product?"

Brinkley writes that U.S. newspapers should ask the U.S. Justice Department for an antitrust exemption to allow publishers to "collaborate on a decision to begin charging for their Web sites. In other countries, newspapers would obviously have to petition the appropriate governing body.

If newspapers did this, each could decide on their own prices, and none would have to charge, he states in his Chronicle column.

"But if most papers in a region - San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, for example - began charging for Web access at more or less the same time, many readers would likely subscribe," he writes, noting that John Sturm, Newspaper Association of America president, told him the idea is "intriguing."

Although readers could find some content outside newspaper Web sites, such as sports scores on espn.com and other sports Web site, "the onus on each paper would be the same one that has prevailed since the first newspapers were published in Germany 500 years ago: to provide unique, exclusive content that readers crave and cannot get anywhere else."