Online Newspapers Don't Get It

Barry Parr expresses very clearly the status of the online newspaper industry: "Our vision of the Web has changed a couple of times in the last decade, but newspapers vision of their online edition remain unchanged. Right now, we're in the middle of a bottom-up revolution in how the Web is created and how people use it. OK, all real revolutions are bottom-up. That's how you know it's in a revolution. Newspapers are treating RSS as a threat to their core business. They are desperately afraid of "aggregators" grabbing their headlines and treating them as wire services." INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE. The more you let it spread, the more you make it accessible, the more you can elegantly and ethically capitalize on it. But online newspapers don't get it. Instead of opening up their resources, and understanding that news are made by the many outstanding individual news reporters available out there, they keep worrying about the number of page views, getting registration names and demographics to sell to advertisers, and splitting their short, superficial and and uninventive articles over multiple pages as to maximize ad impressions and page views in one shot. Instead of scouting the best blog and independent news reporting talent to create a thematic content powerhouse, they insist in massaging original content into shallow uninteresting stories with no punch or real insight. One thing is sure to me: when they will disappear completely, no one will notice.