Looky looky — the Independent's got a sleek new website, with comments on articles, and an RSS feed, and a list of online users, and polls, and forums. Publisher Angelo Lynn even has a blog, though it looks like he might be reprinting his print columns online. Not sure.

Only thing is, you can't read the entire contents of the print edition from that site. For that, you have to click here. And you have to pay. It's $5 a year for subscribers, $30 for non-subscribers.

I think there are other small Vermont papers locking up their print content behind fee walls. Personally, I think this is a bad idea. I for one would not pay each of these papers to read their stories every week. But I do read their sites on a bi-weekly basis to find out what's happening in Vermont communities. I'd like to get that information for free. But is that ripping them off somehow? Do small papers have to charge for their online content? Isn't there a better way to do it for free?