Some press-related linkage

Weekend reading on the Establishment Media and its relationship to the web...

Via NoWhitewash, via Michael Silence, Business Week’s Sarah Lacy offers an apology to the Internet:

...on behalf of reasonable members of the traditional media.

It is not your fault that our business models are slowly dying, that we resisted the Web for so long, and that we then did a mediocre job of adapting our products to it.  Your large portals and search engines..., aggregation services..., and your countless blogs have been very kind in sending us so much traffic at no charge over the years.  We know well that traffic is currency online.  That's why we spend so much time squeezing any remotely relevant ticker into a story, appending “Digg this” buttons to pages, and doing whatever we can to optimize our stories to get the most search traffic possible.

You've done your part to help save us, Internet, and we appreciate it...  It’s not your fault we haven't yet found a way to monetize it or the gumption to cut our costly print operations sufficiently to make new business models viable... - “AP and News Corp.: Wrong About Google”

Online journalist Danny Sullivan (found by following a link in Sarah’s column... amazing how that works, innit?) is a bit more confrontational:  After calling out the Wall Street Journal’s Robert Thomson over Thomson’s contention that the web is an echo chamber,^[1] lacks original content and “exploits” traditional media...

Robert, I’ve been creating original content on the internet for about 12 years longer than you've been editor of the WSJ.  Shut up.  Seriously, shut up.  To say something like that simply indicates you really do not understand that all blogs are not echo chambers.

I mean echo chamber?  Sorry, that’s the mainstream media, too.^{[1 (yes, that’s a duplicate, also snark!]}  I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen stories emerge on the internet only to later appear in a mainstream publication.  The mainstream papers read what the web publishes, then write their own stories, then all the mainstream pubs do their own versions of echoing each other.

...he plays “Call My Bluff” with Rupert Murdoch over Murdoch’s claim that Google “steals” copyright material by indexing it:

Let me help you with that, Rupert.  I’m going to save you all those potential legal fees plus needing to even speak further about the evil of the Big G with two simple lines.  Get your tech person to change your robots.txt file to say this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Done.  Do that, you’re outta Google.  All your pages will be removed, and you needn’t worry about Google listing the Wall Street Journal at all. - “Google’s Love for Newspapers, and How Little They Appreciate It”

In one of the comments to Sullivan’s post, “Anders” makes the conventional argument:

What’s that?  Oh, the local alderman in your town was busted for taking kickbacks from a paving company in his district, because of a reporter from your local paper sifting through the state sales taxes and incorporation papers and happened to notice a link?

Awesome.  Now when that newspaper folds because of twits like you who receive that content for free off of some fucking google twit feed, and when that alderman’s son comes to power in five years and loots the shit out of your town’s tax coffers for him and his buddies, don't come whining to me.

To which I’ll say, “Yeah, right- you wish!”  (For example, I wish my local newspaper had bothered to tell me that my city’s Capital Improvements Board was signing stadium contracts that would make it lose $42 million a year- before they were finalized.  But never let a Discouraging Word be heard about keeping the football team in town, and, oh, look, diversity!)

Which sort of leads to this (week old, but still worth it!) post, by Joanna:

Objectivity: Fail

It says something about the state of the newspaper industry that when I read about allegations that the most respected newspaper in the world spiked a story because it screwed with their candidate's chances, it doesn’t surprise me at all...

Pour yourself a cup of coffee, and read ’em all.

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Posted by: Old Grouch in The Press at 22:51:54 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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