“Newspaper articles don’t matter without a newspaper. Magazine articles don’t matter without a magazine. TV shows don’t matter without a broadcast or cable channel. Newspapers’ inability to generate the same revenue online as in print has nothing to do with content. It’s because on the web (they are failing to package their content), and that’s what the newspaper business, like every other media business, has always been about. Instead, media companies put their content on the web and let search and other aggregators package it.”

“An individual content item on the web, without a package, has marginal value approaching zero — and attempting to charge for an individual item of content is unlikely to change that. What you CAN charge for is the package. Media companies need to be doing what Google is doing — experimenting with new ways to package content, which in a digital-media world means new UIs and new ways to aggregate.”

Post-script: But, wait, isn’t just about every online news site packaging their content in some way? In a follow-up exchange, Karp told me that newspapers need to aggregate content from a wider variety of sources on their pages—and also introduce a “breakthrough UI” of their own, a la the iPhone.

“If news companies were to collaborate on packaging the best content on the web—tapping into the editorial judgment of their journalists at scale—then they could have a shot at competing with Google,” he said. “Innovative digital content packages are also the key to charging for content, i.e. consumers are most likely to pay for high quality packages, which is what they paid for in print.”

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