I worked as a newspaper webmaster from 2000 to 2007. The industry was too slow and too bureaucratic and most importantly didn’t give enough resources, money, to the Web to develop better technology. They could have made a guy like me a leader and instead they paid me shit and kept believing that their classifieds were more useful than Craigslist. They kept believing that their car, home, and other verticals were more valuable than the new products the Web was offering.

Now that their advertising power has waned they’re clinging to the content that they shunned in favor of their advertising sales revenue. Consultants have led them astray all the way. Vendors as well; selling them crappy products to prop up their verticals and siphon what they can.

Newspapers need to be building databases and applications to go with them. They need to stop paying bureaucrats the big salaries and start hiring project managers and web developers. I think the risk of this move is too high for them.

The problem there is they’ve valued the soft skills of the advertising salesmen so much more than the hard skills of the creators they don’t know their head from their ass.

Oh, I never heard of paidcontent.org. I found this page because I searched for “link economy”.

I don't care how people feel about me being annoyed so this will be just a circular argument. We can agree to disagree there. I didn't think it was fair to say "have no clue" dismissing the writer as some quack and wanted to understand your first post.

Thanks for explaining your point Steve and now I understand and I hope others understand your point. I did not realize archaic terms from the 90s like "page views" were used in this article. I read the article again and now figured out why it generated so many comments.

It appears the true fallacy is how the author constantly reference the outdated science of "web analytics" using server logs. Only people who rely on server logs or even google analytics, use terms like <i>"sites"</i> or <i>"page views"</i> and the author is stone cold busted for using whack terms from the nineties.

As Steve alluded to, this is 2009 and the Web is a "contextual economy" and never was a "link economy". I also find it confusing to suggest "RSS link aggregators" actually drive traffic. My research shows the strongest incoming traffic is driven by hyperlinks embedded in contextual content with depth, not from mass media aggregators.

first off, i could give a sh#t what "annoys" people, but since you ask–

web "sites" are/were a decent description of online properties in the '90's. things have changed a bit since, no?

"above the fold", "pageviews", "destination"?

no wonder they are all on life support.

Can you kindly explain the "have no clue" comment you made as the first post?

I get annoyed by people who use half-liner to make a point but they provide depth, which is what you done with the "have no clue" statement.

I do have a clue, but wanted to make sure you knew what "web properties" truly means in 2009 instead of saying "have no clue"..please give us all that clue you are alluding to..thank you.

please ask jim spanfeller about posting pieces like this before proclaiming you were "surprised by the venom…".

he left his gig at forbes after only 2 contributions here.

I have to tell you, I expected my piece to be somewhat controversial, and I was expecting opposition from the folks who are most vocal in talking about links, eco-system, etc. (Jarvis&Co;). But I never expected people like Jarvis and his daylife colleague Ellis to rain dance about how web content companies get much higher CPMs and much higher profits than web aggregators.

In fact, if they (and others, including yourself) thought about it, you all would agree with me. This is the author of WhatWouldGoogleDo, and an executive of a start-up aggregator. They go to investors to get investment in aggregation vehicles. They do not go to investors to get investment in content start-ups. Quite the contrary. They go to foundations to get money to investigate whether there are “new business models for journalism.” If journalistic content creation had such clear economic potential, you would not be seeing all these not-for-profits spring up in all kinds of cities looking to fill the void of the declining newspaper.

And, I was surprised by the venom with which people assumed I only care about newspaper companies. My analysis is about the challenges facing ALL companies seeking a profitable business model in creating web journalistic content. The only difference is that the newspaper companies, seeing the speed of decline in their core business, have a greater urgency to seek profit on the web.

I found one negative response particularly insightful. A guy named Erick Shonfeld http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/16/the-media-bundle-is-dead-long-live-the-news-aggregators/ lectured me “guess what, the media bundle is dead…Each story stands on its own in a world of atomized content.”

I think that sums up the issue where I part company from you and others:

You think the decline of the historical bundle is the end game, I think it's only step 2. I believe the companies that are succeeding on the web are the companies that have figured out — through a combination of aggregation, navigation support and innovative processes or approaches to content — how to create real or de facto bundles. Consider: giants such as itunes(apple), facebook, google, or niche players such as: the huff post iran linker, gawker, maybe telecrunch, etc. They are all just that – they become de facto destinations independent of “search.” Some don’t permit links, and others are very smart about what they allow to be searched/linked (for many, facebook is in fact a 'walled garden'). It does not matter one industrial provenance, but if you want to be successful, one needs to figure how to recreate that bundle, rather than try to be the lucky “atom,” who gets a bundle of traffic for one or more good 'stories'.

Arnon, you call me out for saying that there are content-driven businesses on the Web making money. You ask, where are they? Are you serious? How about right here — PaidContent?

The Web is young, its businesses are early in their lifecycles, hardly any are mature and metrics are different. HuffPo is doing very well, and I bet its investors are happy. Gawker is also weathering an unprecedented economic storm pretty well. The Daily Beast? They just launched, you expect them to be profitable immediately? Regardless, they seem to be doing OK.

I do like your description of this aggregator activity as "scraping" — you say you're not a lawyer, clearly you're not a programmer either. "Scraping", such a scary word, but one with a very clear technical definition.

What aggregators are doing is pulling information from public RSS feeds that the newspapers themselves have created and published. The aggregators are NOT "scraping" HTML pages for content. Scraping is manual work and frankly doesn't scale that well.

If the newspapers were so concerned, they would restrict the content of the RSS feeds to brief excerpts, as many sources already do. But that wouldn't make a good story, would it?

This is not a technology problem. It's a business problem. Newspapers got out of the business (journalism, serving the community) we thought they were in, and they invested heavily into cheap wire content and classifieds.

Newspapers didn't just start sucking. They've sucked for a long time. Sometimes they do good work, true. But most of the time, they're filled with garbage. Pick up a Sunday paper outside of NYC, and dissect it. It's not pretty.

Newspapers stopped caring about their product because the money was flowing and profits were high. And now, the tide's gone out, and they are stranded.

I would like to think that there's a fix available, but likely, there isn't. You said it yourself, consumers don't want what newspapers are selling.

What newspapers need to do is look beyond journalism for value. They need intelligent community voices, and they need lots of databases — not co-incidentally, the two primary ingredients of journalism.

EveryBlock is a great example of this. It could be the future of newspapers. Oh damn, they just got bought by MSNBC. :)

Until newspapers figure out how to provide value to their communities — to build products the community actually wants — there's not going to be any revenue stream to speak of. And until then, it's frankly premature to start any discussions about the future of newspaper journalism.

Don't worry though, some enterprising online startup will show up to start doing your journalism. You just won't recognize them. :)