By Russell Perkins An Associated Press story this morning reports the seemingly impossible: optimism among newspaper publishers that paid, digital uptake of their content is substantial, growing and is on its way to becoming a significant and durable revenue stream. Digital delivery of news content has a double benefit to newspapers because not only is subscription revenue increasing, publishers are simultaneously able to reduce or even eliminate their print editions, yielding significant cost savings as well.Perhaps the biggest news here is not that newspaper editors are making paywalls work, but that they are so surprised by this fact. After all, almost all newspapers have always charged for subscriptions in print, albeit at subsidized price points. Indeed, if newspaper publishers hadn’t spent the last fifteen years so aggressively giving away their content online, they might find themselves in very different and superior circumstances today.Yes, I will acknowledge that news is meaningfully different from other types of content. News happens quickly, is perishable, and large numbers of people seem more than happy with a headline and a quick summary as opposed to long-form analysis. That’s a tough environment in which to operate, particularly if you care to operate profitably.  But the newspaper business is also about power and influence, and to achieve and maintain these, you need the biggest possible audience. Big audiences, done right, also tended to yield nice monopoly positions in many markets. And since large audiences have — traditionally — brought along large amounts of advertising, power and influence have also — traditionally — worked as a pretty good business model as well, especially so when coupled with a lack of any real competition. The digital world, as we know, up-ended this comfy state of affairs, and newspapers have been struggling to re-define themselves for more than a decade now.What seems to be emerging from the fog, after a decade of missteps and lost opportunities, is a digital newspaper very much in the model of the print newspaper: subscription-based (probably with the increasingly popular metered model to help maintain audience and preserve influence), updated as frequently as the technology permits, full of increasingly expensive advertising as publishers learn to sell the power of the various digital formats they will offer, and quite profitable. The bad news? While margins will be good, overall revenue will decline. Newspapers will be good businesses once again, but smaller businesses, something the entire media industry is coming to reluctantly recognize. Indeed, the faster newspapers start putting their valuable content behind paywalls, the faster this not unpleasant future will emerge.My simple advice to the industry: stop being surprised by subscriptions, and start selling them instead!