What? There's no bait and switch - the site tells you as soon as you load that you need a subscription.
> These journalists want all the benefits of the web
Where's this coming from? Where's this "want"? Most of the stuff that you listed is either explicitly paid for or just comes with the web automatically.
> free indexing
Yes, Google offers free indexing because they get search engine ad revenue as a result. There's no "stealing" here.
> archiving
Hosting costs money. Journalists pay for that themselves. There's nothing "free" about it. The end.
> free global distribution
They're also paying bandwidth costs.
> and rendering
There's no way to view a page on the internet without rendering it on your computer. That's not something that journalists are taking advantage of - it's how the internet works. Also, publishers pay for hosting costs, too...
> virtual word-of-mouth advertising
Word-of-mouth is completely unrelated to the internet.
> a huge and easy revenue generation model
Please don't tell me that you're complaining about publishers trying to recoup costs of the journaling process. Who's going to pay for the salaries of writers? Infrastructure costs? Distribution? Web development?
> Their production and design costs are nothing compared to two decades ago.
...and yet, the costs are still there. Publishing is not free, especially if you want content to publish, and especially if you want quality content.
> It's like they feel entitled to all this free stuff and the one thing they offer of value they pull back at the last second.
The only entitlement here is you feeling entitled to the work of journalists. This is a rant with little substance behind it, predicated on the false assumption that publishers and journalists have no costs.