Don’t know how I even got here, just following the blog trail link to link.

Thank you for having me, great read.
Brad West ~ onomoney

1. The headline is the product. Unlike the title of a book or a webpage, the title of a news story is valuable in and of itself. While I don’t pretend to know the numbers, I believe I am safe in the assumption that a substantial proportion of news customers online are merely interested in reading the headlines. Occasionally those headlines will attract a click, but more often than not an individual visitor feels content to read “GM to sell Hummer to Chinese company” without delving into the details. Traditional media prior to the internet enjoyed the eyeballs of both those who wanted the quick headline and the complete story. A meaningful part of their product line has been pried away by Fair Use as I now can find those same headlines on virtually every web portal in existence.

2. Blogger’s Aren’t the Press. Notice that I didn’t use the word “journalist”. Yes, Danny Sullivan is a Journalist, but his argument cannibalizes itself when he talks about the benefits the “press” gets, such as a guaranteed seat at a Presidential Press Conference, or a returned phone call from a government agency. An organized news creation industry of wide repute and mass appeal is an essential qualification of an accountable government and economy. No one outside of online marketing knows Danny Sullivan so, as an independent Journalist, he will be far less effective at garnering the attention of those in power. Now, I am not saying that it can’t be done, or hasn’t, or that bloggers don’t serve a vital role in the journalistic process (someone has to police the press too!), but imagining journalism without the behemoth news agencies is hard to do. Will Danny Sullivan put up the money for a camera crew, plane ticket, housing, etc. to go report in the middle of a remote war zone? Do we simply hope that there are enough competent, niche bloggers out there who are comfortable bootstrapping their own independent businesses? And then, how does Google find which ones to trust when the sources begin to out-number the stories? The press, not just journalists and journalism, is vital.

3. Collective Action Problem. Kos’s argument about the use of a robots tag to block Google is just silly. The sources of major national and international news are quite small in comparison to the total number of content producers altogether. However, these sources tend to release a lot of similar information that cannot be distinguished by the title of the content alone. Subsequently, these sources would need nearly perfect cooperation from all sources to protect their headlines. If only a handful of them chose to continue to allow their content to be available for headline aggregators, the others would lose all available traffic and the headline-only readers would remain satiated. Of course, the rest of us would have to go from site to site to find trusted providers or, better yet, visit the single site that pays for a feed from the group of sources, much in the same way that many buy news from the Associated Press.

Ultimately, I don’t have a realistic solution, but I do think that there is a good question we should all be asking…

Do you think the chance of sending a newspaper a visitor of yours is a fair price to pay for the headlines their Journalists write?

Media changes, affects their industry and laws need to be passed all of a sudden to keep a business model highly profitable.

Good journalism is an oxymoron. It never has existed. It never will exist.

While “Good journalism” is the exception to the rule, it far from being oxymoron. You just need to able to sort the wheat from chaff.

It’s a wonder I survived the frustrations I experienced trying to explain the coming tide to these people. Because I worked on the online side of things I was definitely treated as an outsider, an obstacle, and part of a problem they hoped would just go away. Now, for a lot of companies it’s too late to embrace online journalism. Those companies are folding because they were not smart enough to see that the demand for news is not dependent upon the format in which it is delivered.

I do not believe that Journalism is in trouble. Traditional media outlets, specifically newspapers, may be in deep trouble, but the demand for quality content is still there.

And I personally think that if the content is quality, and original, and not available anywhere else, that people would pay to access it online. And we all know that where they eyeballs are, the advertising dollars will follow.