USA Today hopes the site will draw a lot more traffic without putting new demands on its own staff. "We're not going to sit and write 4,000 'How to Travel with a Toddler' or 'How to Find the Best Airfare Deals' pieces, but that's the sort of thing people are searching the search engines for," said Victoria Borton, general manager for travel at USA today.

Looks like USA Today is adapting to the new environment. Better than going on and closing up shop.

Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown. Marc Andreessen has the same advice for old media companies: “Burn the boats.”

Yesterday, Andreessen was in New York City and we met up. We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. In particular, he was talking about print media such as newspapers and magazines, and his longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will.

The comments on this post are great.

The epic Everything Free VS. Paywall debate continues.

We all know a paywall will not work for newspapers.

Such arrogance.