Eighteen years since the advent of the World Wide Web, and still newspaper publishers are struggling with this medium’s most simple and basic tenets, much like the proverbial blind men flailing against a digital elephant.

As paid newspaper circulation has continued its slide toward oblivion, some publishers have begun building paywalls designed to force readers to buy a subscription or pay a fee to read the brilliant prose hidden within.

Others have leveled Blame Fingers at the likes of Google, suggesting that if search engines point people toward newspaper web sites, the added notoriety is somehow a bad thing.

Publishers seem unable to make the connection between news staffs decimated by layoffs, less local coverage, stilted shovelware sites and a disenfranchised audience that could get what it was looking for more cheaply and easily almost anywhere else on the web.

But then, most newspaper publishers are not (Attleboro, Mass.) Sun Chronicle Publisher Oreste P. D’Arconte.

Eschewing the paywall concept, D’Arconte unveiled a different scheme last week for annoying any remaining loyal readers of the paper’s web site: He now is charging readers for the privilege of posting comments at the end of stories.