Isn’t it commonly accepted that eBay, Craigslist and other Internet properties took away much of the need for running ads in local papers? Google is hardly to blame for that dynamic.

Don’t you think that the Internet (in general) is also eating into the business of “Yellow Pages” publishers, Encyclopedia publishers, hard-copy map publishers? I’ve seen everyday evidence of all of these things and don’t see how you can thoughtfully separate the plight of the “newspaper industry” (which I see as multiple things) from that of other paper-based businesses.

I’ve never been less happy with the quality of the mainstream media as I am today. One question I have is whether the quality is actually less, or was it bad all along and the huge variety of alternative sources is just now showing it up for what it is.

For a newshound, there is value in having a trusted source summarize the important points from a congressional hearing, a White House press conference or a commercial companies product announcements. Ohhhh, but don’t go viewing those original materials yourself on C-Span, or government or corporate web sites, because you will most certainly be disappointed with that summary that you used to think was good enough.

Dan Rather, Jason Blair and a few other notables have awakened many people to the extent to which news can be manufactured out of thin air or a journalists imagination and has also made many more sensitive to how our opinions can be manipulated even by journalists who lace their stories with a few facts.

I don’t know that Google is the cure for bad journalism, but it certainly hasn’t caused a problem that was well underway before Google even existed.

the news industry does not need to reduce supply, as there is still a high demand for news, it needs to reduce redundancy of content. if every headline article across a number of newspapers contains the same information it might still make sense on your local newspaper but not anymore when you try to make a difference online. diversification, opinion pieces or investigative journalism could be a solution.

I agree that we agree on some of the basics. I still think there’s value in adding value to original high quality content whether it’s local or global. Creating communities of interest is the goal.

I also agree with Bill Richardson that there has to be some model for creators of high quality original content get paid for their work. That may come as the number of creators diminishes. Or you may have a model where original producers syndicate their content using a “cable-like” model. Anyone could pick that content up (NYTimes newswire API for example) and add value to it.

Moderated (and ranked) comments (like Disqus for example) that Curt Carmack suggests could be one. Deeper content like the policy wiki that the G&M put up a while ago could be another. Etc. etc. The point is that in providing value add you get the attention/stickiness and focus that may drive more valuable ad revenue and/or services that customers might subscribe to.

The importance of local is more from the largest potential source of new revenue. Local business who has been locked out of newspapers because of cost and an arcane sales process.

“More important than trying to save the wheezing newspaper industry as it exists now, is to invest time and money into the young and healthy news orgs of the future––the TPM’s and Politicos and HuffPo’s of this world.”

Really, Matt? These young, vital sites you love rely primarily on content generated by the “dinosaurs” that you believe will soon be extinct. What will these young sites do then?

Ralph Rannalli is likely right that it is the current bounty of free, high-quality news content that is artificial. We are in a transition period. The web is currently not generating enough revenue (on a per-content provider basis) to sustain the production of high-quality news. We will inevitably see fewer sources of quality content and more pay content.

My top three sources of news — the sites and sources that I visit every single day — are, in order:

* http://www.groklaw.net/

* direct email from Good Morning Silicon Valley (http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/)

* http://www.theregister.co.uk/

Do you see the pattern? They’re all “local” in some sense, and they’re not syndicated. Each of those sites provides me with relevant, interesting, and well-commented articles that I can’t find anywhere else, including Google.

I only turn to Google News to find details on breaking headlines. For any such headline, as Nick pointed out, there are thousands of articles. But the vast majority of those thousands of articles are just syndicated copies of one single story.

Nick says

“Syndication makes sense when articles remain on the paper they were printed on. It doesn’t make sense when articles float freely across the global web.”

That makes perfect sense to me. If you write an article that you hope to get people to pay for (directly or indirectly via advertising), you don’t get the money by giving the readers ten thousand possible places to read it when you only get paid if they read it on your site in particular. Now, if each of those ten thousand sites pays you to host your article, that may help you a little bit, but it probably won’t help those sites draw more traffic to themselves. A successful news site needs to provide a compelling reason for their audience to be faithful. That doesn’t happen if when the audience can find the exact same articles on thousands of other sites.

The ebook concept is interesting. I’m not disputing that local won’t be good for newspapers but that they needn’t be limited to it. The interesting concept of ebooks (value added content) illustrates that newpapers could find a new business model in specialty content. I also think they could extend the long tail (and attention/stickiness) if they would start building communities around this. Leveraging what Google already does well may help them not hurt them if they do.

My guess is that newspapers have evolved in a monoply situation so they are having a hard time to see themselves as value added distributors of the news. In the past if there was a content value it was with the columnists or the “scoop.” But NYTimes Select seems to have demonstrated that even the NYT columnists lose more than they gain by charging for access. And “breaking news” has drifted to the web.

The recent announcement that newspapers are going to try to sell multipart stories in the form of a an ebook is very interesting. It allows them to monetize the long tail of their content. Since the marginal cost is essentially zero, and the cost of production and distribution is essentially zero, that should find a small but profitable market.

I think it has to be primarily local because only local will attract local advertisers. I hate to keep playing my one note but, print ads for local business is a proven revenue stream. It’s a huge underserved market that has the ability to bring new money into the game.

Google is the leader in search doesn’t mean that others can’t provide better solutions that complement and/or replace what Google offers. I’ll draw an analogy to payments in banking. As payments have moved from paper to electronic banks (and retailers etc.) have increasingly wanted to control the payment experience because this allows them to add value to the experience (through advertising, value added payment services etc.). It doesn’t mean that they’re going to get into the clearing business or the network business. But the more stickiness they can have around the transaction the greater potential for them to make money.

I disagree with the comments that this has to be local though. Why is that? If you have valuable services and content then there’s no reason for it to be constrained to being local.

Question: As a user, where do you go to find a one-stop shop for news? Your local newspaper website, or Google News/Drudge/HuffPo/etc? Why?

People need filters in this world, and the more targeted those filters are and can be, the more valuable they will be to consumers, be they readers or advertisers.

All this said, I don’t think this debate we’re having will make much of difference in the long run. It’s a Darwinian world out there––newspapers are gonna start dying soon. The industry will contract. The dinosaurs will die off, and in their place will rise the mammals. You can waste a lot of time trying to teach a brontosaurus to be a lemur, but nature will ultimately have it’s way. The internet naysayers and throwbacks here will ultimately reap the fruits of their labor––and die. C’est la vie.

The dinosaurs will not save us, nor will they save themselves.

More important than trying to save the wheezing newspaper industry as it exists now, is to invest time and money into the young and healthy news orgs of the future––the TPM’s and Politicos and HuffPo’s of this world.

Don’t waste money on the terminally ill––just give ‘em pain meds and call it a day.

What I disagree with Nick about is the idea that newspapers have to (or even can) somehow return to a situation where they controlled and restricted distribution, and recreate scarcity in any meaningful sense. Papers should use Google, not try to do an end-run around it, or pretend that the Internet and its effects on the distribution of content can somehow be undone.

The issue is that newspapers and other media companies are only now beginning to realize the economic value of aggregation on the web, and that, as Tim points out, they’ve always been in the aggregation business.

The real problem is not Google but rather that newspapers no longer have control over distribution, of their content or any other content. They walked away from the aggregation business on the web — or rather they failed to recognize the opportunity.

Most of all, in the hyper-competitive web content ecosystem, no newspaper has the kind of distribution power by themselves that they did as a local monopoly.

But if news sites were to collaborate, they could create an aggregator far more valuable than Google News. There’s a huge opportunity there — the battle is far from over.

The question is, will they collaborate?

With respect, I’m having a hard time seeing the grounds for the argument.

Perhaps if we lose the “middleman” term and replace it with “aggregator” or “trusted filter”?

For many, many years, those terms described newspapers. Papers weren’t just content creators — a large part of what they did was to bring together information from multiple sources, largely their newsrooms and wire services, but also freelancers and, in the case of conglomerates, other newspapers. Also, a huge swath of their content was user-generated, in the classified pages.

In a very real sense, the local newspaper was the internet before the internet arrived.

Where papers failed miserably was to not realize that they were, in effect, middlemen, and allowed Google and other aggregators to swoop in and own that space.

If newspapers have any chance of reclaiming that space in their local markets, they’re going to have to start thinking like aggregators again. They need to do a better job of showing local visitors — whether they come directly or through Google — that they make sense as a local online destination, with good original content and unparalleled links to other relevant local content. If I’m reading you correctly, that’s the value you talk about in the last graf of your post.

You say that “the interest of a profit-seeking online news outlet is to concentrate traffic at its site in a large enough volume to actually make money.” No disagreement there — although I would say attention rather than traffic, which is an important distinction. You also say, however, that “the interest of Google is to concentrate traffic at its search engine while sending traffic to content sites in a highly fragmented manner.” That’s just not true, and describing it that way is a deliberate distortion.

Google couldn’t care less whether it is sending traffic to content sites in a highly fragmented manner. It displays search results in the best way it knows how, period. If your site provides the best information, it will draw a corresponding amount of traffic from Google the middleman. Both you and Scott assume — and not just assume, but take as axiomatic — that the amount of traffic Google provides is not enough (and will never be enough) to allow newspaper sites to make money.

That’s the part we disagree on. It’s not enough because newspapers aren’t thinking about their businesses properly, aren’t maximizing their value to readers properly, and are stuck (along with advertisers) thinking only about banner ads. You seem to be desperately trying to hold back the tide and retain the control — both distribution and pricing control — over content that newspapers used to enjoy, but that’s just not possible, and implying that it is prevents newspapers from confronting the reality that their business model has fundamentally changed.

I’m going to say it again: if Google displaying a headline and a few sentences of your content is enough to ruin your business model and steal all of the attention that you think is rightfully yours, then you deserve to fail.

However, search engines also make it less likely that visitors will enter a site through the “front door”, probably make it less likely that visitors will be converted to repeat users, and less likely that they will view other articles on the site.

It doesn’t sound too appealing (nor practical) to suggest that newspapers collaborate to increase scarcity. However, the corollary is probably true: there are too many producers of news stories for the same news events. When that condition exists, it generally means that each individual news story has less value, all things being equal.

So, it would seem that the overall impact of search engines on newspapers may actually be negative. But whatever the impact on news sites, the search engines end up with a definite positive benefit from handling the users’ interactions with all the news articles.

I think that’s close to what Nick was saying.

But once information is symmetric, controlling information as a business strategy won’t work.

The way I look at it, there are three elements of a user network. The OEM – original equipment manufacturer. The OPM – the original product manufacturer. The VAR – the value added reseller.

The internet is the original equipment that is the infrastructure for information distribution. It is built by commercial entities AND mostly by prosumers. News-on-paper is a locally delivered original product. Everybody who wants to make money in the information business is either an OPM or a VAR.

Google is an OPM by creating a web advertising platform. To make alot of money from advertising on the web means gigantic scale. No newspaper can use CPM of CPC to make serious money, because they can’t get to scale.

So that leaves OPM- local news, and news-on-paper, invent new stuff that people want to buy and VAR, curate the appropriate news for people who are interested at that time in those stories.