The business of publishing relies on advertising revenue. Subscriptions and newsstand revenue barely cover the costs of distribution. A publisher must guarantee to an advertiser that a certain number of people read a publication and are exposed to the ads. And, they factor in multiple readers at libraries, sharing copies, etc. So, its fine if you go to the library and read the paper to save money, because the publisher saves distribution costs and still gets the page views it needs to charge the advertiser. They have a right to be concerned about theft and re-distribution of their content without advertising. That is what you are advocating and there is no justification for your position.
If I recall, there was no loss shown by LAT/WAshCompost in this action. Second, most newspaper advertising in Los Angeles is of little value here in Tennessee. Do you think I'd drive all the way to LA to buy a Ford based on a full-page ad in their print paper that I read at the local library? And face it; auto dealers and other local ads represent a huge chunk of printed page advertising dollars.
Third, most archived information available for free (and I know that you hate that word) on library fishtape carries old, obsolete advertising if any at all. The sale has ended. The products have changed. And archiving news is part of this issue since papers regularly try to hide what they had available days before.
The papers want their cake and eat it too. On the one hand, they offer something for free that can be cut/pasted by anyone and saved to any hard drive with a little space on it; then they go on to claim that doing so might hurt revenue. Don't set a plate full of food on my table then tell me I can't eat it. Its on my table; its mine.
The papers are trying to apply old printed-page standards to an international, free-flowing information medium that is very much as uncontrollable as speech itself. I would suggest that a new revenue paradigm is in order since the old one doesn't and cannot apply. What if freerepublic were off-shore and out of the jurisdiction of the US courts and within a soveriegn nation? How would you apply this paradigm then?
I surmise that to try to prevent people from sharing information, they are trying to control the news. As has been pointed out, the news happens for free. If they want to spread the word for free, that's their problem. There are other resources for the information, though not too many as biased as LAT/WAshCompost.