Yes, but the web is an extremely recent phenomenon relative to journalism in general, and journalism has historically been something where you had to pay to read.
That's true, but the medium's social norms tend to be stronger than the content's social norms. After all, the vast majority of web pages are free to view, and yet all the types of content on them were traditionally paid (because, for one thing, prior to the Internet most content was much more expensive to deliver).
