Terry Heaton is also concerned about newspapers willingly shutting themselves off from the world. He says this is an ill-conceived effort to make money the old way — by selling scarcity.

News content online is a ubiquitous and increasingly commodified community, and attempts to restrict access so as to create scarcity will only result in the isolation of those who need most to be a part of the discussion, professional journalists. …

The newspaper industry is obsessed with an old model, and rather than trying to fit its square peg into the round hole of Media 2.0, it makes much more sense to focus our attention elsewhere. We should nurture our legacy products as best we can, but we simply must separate our ability to make money from our dependence on the content we create.

The key to that is in defining, understanding and developing the Local Web.

The full post is here.