Snap Out of It Newspaper-Land, Google is Not the Enemy

Ah! A sensible voice arises out of the din. This is from Mark Gimein at Slate‘s The Big Money, who argues that linking and aggregators are not to blame, instead “it’s the technology behind the Web,” which allows us to consume our news a la carte making sweeping (and overpriced) subscription fees untenable: “For many years [newspaper] customers — both readers and advertisers — paid for a big package of newsprint when most folks only read a small fraction of it. In bite-size pieces, it doesn’t look like it’s worth as much.” Here’s a look, though the whole thing is worth a read.

Welcome to the ongoing circus of the media apocalypse. At this point in news history, it seems almost cruel to crash the pity party of the print media. Hardly anyone needs an overview of why at this moment people who own newspapers and work at newspapers are freaking out about Google and everyone else who links to their stories.
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Blaming Google for this is wildly off base…The alternative to Google isn’t a utopia in which everyone magically finds just the high-quality content they want with no middleman. No, the alternative is Comcast.
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It’s not Google or Drudge or the Huffington Post or Newser that led media to deliver their goods a la carte. It’s the technology behind the Web.

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