I especially liked this quote:

By creating scarcity, we might finally get fair value for the work we do. — Anthony Moor of the Dallas Morning News

I think it’s pretty clear. This guy knows he’s producing no real value. The only thing he knows how to do is to force the market into a zero-sum game, like the proverbial glazier paying a kid from the neighborhood to break perfectly good windows for him to fix. Well guess what, some of us actually celebrate the end of (certain kinds of) scarcity.

Readers are not newspapers’ customers. The advertisers are. The job of pretty much any modern newspaper is to cram as many ads onto as little paper as possible, then flow “news” around it. Ideally, that news is appealing enough for the newspaper to get lots of readers. Readership is the commodity that newspapers are selling to advertisers.

If the transition to the internet is not generating sufficient revenue for newspapers, despite the traffic that Google sends their way, the newspapers should raise their internet ad rate prices.

People who have any reasonable degree of power operate on the public relations model. They lock their doors, provide doorkeepers, and only reveal to a reporter those things which they want published, or are legally required to publish. Computers have helped the process along by reducing the number of people within the organization who have “need-to-know,” and these are likely to be people whose interests are aligned with those of the organization (eg. they have stock options). Investigative reporting only works within very narrow limits. Generally speaking, an employee who has something to tell will talk to a reporter, without at least tacit authorization, only under about the same circumstances in which he might go to the police. So the reporter is inevitably driven back to press conferences and press releases. Nowadays, everyone has his own website, and the PR operator can publish without the intervention of a newspaper. For the vast majority of corporations, government agencies, etc., the newspaper has little or no advantage over the blogger.

The classic triumph of investigative journalism was of course Watergate. Watergate started with CIA agents who had been caught red-handed in burglarizing an office, and who had been arrested by the ordinary police. It spread as people who had committed crimes on the orders of the president became afraid that the president would cause them to be sent to prison as expendable scapegoats. The one important advantage the reporters had over the police was that statements made to a reporter, while serving to shift blame onto the boss, were legally hearsay. A policeman would have to caution the speaker, and read him his Miranda rights. Now, of course, WikiLeaks performs the same function. A subordinate criminal afraid of getting caught can circulate particulars without making a legal confession.

Even Watergate operated under fairly specific circumstances. Most importantly, Richard Nixon would not submit to blackmail. He preferred to resign his office, rather than to halt the Watergate investigation with a few well-placed commutations and/or pardons. His contemporaries called him “Richard III,” conceding that whatever his faults, he would choose to die bravely on Bosworth Field (parenthetically, the contemporary pundits would have meant Richard III as played by Sir Laurence Olivier in the 1956 film). Of course, as Scooter Libby discovered to his advantage, George W. Bush is not so fine a man as Richard Nixon was. He had been called “George III,” the mad king misled by his advisers, but perhaps an even more apt comparison might be Christopher Marlowe’s morally pathetic “Edward The Second,” with Dick Cheney as the court favorite Piers Gaveston. Under the circumstances, “Investigative Journalism,” as practiced by Judith Miller and Toni Locy, rapidly degenerated into a shameful collaboration with the Bush regime in its efforts to vilify its critics and divert blame for its crimes.

It was bloggers who offered impressive resistance, and could not be bought off.

There are of course special cases and exceptions to the difficulties of investigative reporting. For example, it is not too difficult to report on the working conditions of casually employed workers. A good many reporters have managed to get casual employment and then report about it.

Don’t blame, just use robots.txt and Move on or stop using interconnected computers.

The paper part of the newspaper is dead … Get over it.

The only thing that will remain is going to be vanity presses like HP is proposing with their printing service [ http://magcloud.com/ ]

We didn’t fight for the rights of the buggy whip makers either … Suck it up.

Journalism however is definitely NOT DEAD.

It has been democratized, popularized, localized, opened up, opened on and opened for a new business model.

If you worked as an editor or for an editor, you are going to find that the average person hasn’t suddenly improved in spelling or grammar, logic or comprehension, ability to communicate or in layout skills.

We just have to find you a new way to get news that you write out there; .PDF files on your servers being distributed via RSS files that the Post Office has on their server and that gives access to the latest content for $ would go a long way towards granting you a new lease on life.

The RSS file can even contain the highlights and a little bit of text from the articles which are still on your servers.

Actually, you can extract the words from your articles, remove duplicates, sort them, and let Google be able to include or eliminate an article from a search, present the little highlight snatch of text to let potential readers determine if they are interested and then the post office can: 1) let subscribers access the article OR 2) charge for access to the article.

This last part, subscription fulfillment or piece-meal charging, would be done by the post office. Nobody has ever had a problem paying for a stamp or expected a letter to be delivered without a stamp.

Once the “news” becomes the “olds”, say after a week for most articles, let Gooogle have at the original that you can store in a separate server.

a) The transmission of the articles is almost free.

b) The distribution of the articles is almost free.

c) The access is cheap but NOT free and the post office sees to that and that helps them with their business model.

d) The post office send you a share of the money collected (and YOU KNOW HOW OFTEN AN ARTICLE IS FETCHED OFF OF YOUR SERVERS FROM A PARTICULAR IP ADDRESS.)

There is a business model that would work, it would
1) let new gathering organizations gather news,
2) let readers read,
3) let the post office disseminate and collect payments and disburse funds

My name is Anthony Moor, and I’m now the guy attributed with the silly idea of stopping indexing of news content by Google for a week.

Just to clarify, I didn’t say that. I was misquoted. Quite the contrary, I emphasized to reporter Dirk Smillie that search engines are the default home page for people using the Internet, and as such, direct a lot of traffic to us. That traffic is important. I don’t believe Google is “stealing” our content. And I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek about ‘turning off’ to Google. We don’t matter much to Google.

I wasn’t talking about stopping indexing our sites on Google. I was musing about what might happen if all news sites stopped publishing news on the Web… stopped digital publishing.. for a week. What would happen? Would they survive? (Maybe.)

I told Dirk this was one of those things I fantasized about late at night… as kind of a thought experiment. I think it’s an interesting question. I didn’t articulate it very well and it wasn’t a serious proposal.

Google organizes the Web. Something needs to do that. My concern is that they’re effectively a monopoly player in that space. Oh sure, there’s Yahoo, but who “Yahoos” information on the Web?

So I’m much more concerned about the unequal relationship between Google and the rest of the Internet. They are so big and so important to the ecosystem that there is little we can do to affect that relationship except game Google (getting our search results higher via SEO etc.) In a sense, their technology dictates the audience and business terms of the Web.

What I wish could really happen is an organization and search schema that is open standards based that resides outside one company’s secret algorithms. I think the Semantic Web holds that promise — a peer-to-peer infrastructure where information “talks” to other information in a common meta-language. Done right, you might not need Google.

Google uses links to organize the Web. The Semantic Web uses information about information to organize the Web. Arguably it’s more powerful. And if it weren’t “owned” by anyone, then we all might benefit in proportion to our information’s relevance and not watch most of the money flowing to Google.