How about plain old JOURNALISM and let the story go where it goes? And get up to speed.! Ilearned 75 hous members voted in suport of ACORN hours ago! And pelosi is trying to convince Americans other Americans are not "ballanced" mentaly. as SHE crys.
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Daniel Lyons
Exterminate the Parasites
A radical plan to save old media.
Published Sep 3, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Sep 14, 2009
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Since the dawn of the Internet, news organizations have accepted the notion that the only way to survive the onslaught of the Web is to publish everything online, at no cost to readers, and let anyone in the world synopsize it, refer to it, and copy and link to it. You can't charge for your work—that's rule No. 1 on the Internet. And you can't block others from copying or linking to it—that's rule No. 2.
But those rules are starting to look stupid. All the media companies that follow them are going broke, so now they're casting about for a new business model. Some are talking about making readers pay subscription fees. But the most radical idea, and the one I find most intriguing, is being advanced by Mark Cuban, a billionaire Internet entrepreneur. Cuban's advice: declare war on the "aggregator" Web sites that get a free ride on content. These aggregators—sites like Drudge Report, Newser, and countless others—don't create much original material. They mostly just synopsize stuff from mainstream newspapers and magazines, and provide a link to the original.
Think about this for a minute. The aggregators and the old-media guys are competing for the same advertising dollars. But the aggregators compete using content that the old-media guys create and give to them at no cost. This is insane, right? It's like fighting a war and supplying the enemy with guns and bullets.
But this, we are told, is how the Internet must operate—it's the spirit of the Web, where everything is freely shared. Cuban says that's hogwash. He says the media companies should kill off these parasites by using a little piece of software that blocks incoming links from aggregators. If the aggregators can't link to other people's stories, they die. With a few lines of code, the old-media guys could snuff them out.
Sure, it's brutal. But it sounds like it could work, doesn't it? Yet for espousing such heresy on his blog last month, Cuban was condemned as either evil, or stupid, or both. MARK CUBAN IS A BIG FAT IDIOT was the headline of a response piece by Michael Wolff, a columnist for Vanity Fair and the founder of Newser, one of the aggregator sites that Cuban suggested was ripe for blocking. Wolff claims Newser and other aggregators are "doing a service to news organizations because a portion of our readers click through to the original story." Most Internet gurus agree. Not Cuban. He says that (a) very few readers actually click through to the original story; and (b) even when they do, the news companies don't make any money from them.
The problem with Cuban's "blockade" strategy is that it works only if everybody does it. If your Web site blocks links but your competitors don't, you're basically committing suicide. You'll be cut off from a big source of traffic, while aggregators will survive by feeding off your rivals.
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