I have a notebook full of meeting quotes from 2001, talking about how my paper will resist the Internet tooth and nail… and another notebook from 2006, with the same maroons talking about how the Internet now has to be our main focus because it’s the future after all.

Reminds me of 1995, when I suggested that we set up a local bulletin board to take advantage of this growing technology. Perhaps we could type in game notes from the local NBA team so users could get the inside scoop; perhaps we could let them call a number and listen to the complete coach’s interview rather than the quotes we used…. and the response was hacked down and whittled to bits until it became a news-by-fax service that allowed subscribers to receive WIRE stories that didn’t make the paper by fax instead. Yawn? Yawn! Somewhere in the basement is a $125k fax server system that delivered fewer than 5,000 pages before being doomed obsolete.

The newspaper business is dying because newspaper executives are old-school morons completely unable to look forward. When has a newspaper ever SET a trend? Never. They simply follow, like lemmings off a cliff. Someday, when I land on my feet, I’ll be very thankful the newspaper business crapped me out. My mortgage holder and I both hope that day comes soon.

I’ll try to keep this short by using short clips and responses… but its gonna be hard.

One of the key core competencies of a publication is the process of selecting “all the news thats fit to print”.

“Fit” in who’s opinion. Maybe I want to have my own opinion and not be limited to the opinion of the editor of the local paper.

When someone selects google news as their destination for news discovery it is probably at the expense of another destination or product who aspires to be a “discovery destination”.

I absolutely agree. And why should I be forced to use an inferior destination for news discover simply because it happens to be geographically located close to me? What if I want a discovery portal that’s focused on Keybords, or hand sanitizer or people named Mark… what makes any one filter better than another? My (the consumer’s) opinion of that filter, period.

They just lost their position as a trusted source where real people make decisions on what content they think their readers will want to discover – to an algorithm.

Again with deciding for me what I want to read! How about I get a choice… OR …maybe I do have a choice, I chose to use a filter that does what I want… say Google!?! And who cares if it algorithmic, apparently their algorithm is much better than my local editor’s cognitive choices… or I wouldn’t be using Google in the first place, right?

You immediately become one of 2,172 articles… That makes you a commodity.

Well, now who’s fault is it that the local paper can’t take the initiative to do a little more than run the same story 2,171 other sources ran? Besides, even in Dallas, there aren’t that many different sources for a local story. You’re mixing local against national/world here. Lets keep the comparisons on the same level. Oh, and you bet that makes you a commodity. Is Google supposed to protect you from that? No, then who is? That’s right… YOU are.

All that promotion you did saying how good your reporters are ?

How about you stop “promoting” your reporters quality and show me. Make them stand out in the crowd of 2,172.

There is no sane reason to allow them to co-opt your brand and use it to accelerate the growth of a business,

And as Google has said repeatedly, if you want out it only takes on line in your robots.txt file and you’re out. Don’t complain about it, don’t write stories about how Google is stealing your content, don’t go on tv or before congress fishing for sympathy… just cut them off! It seems as though you are saying the papers can do it on their own, let see it. Block the googlebot and get on with it!

Even though I strongly disagree with you on this topic, I still love reading your blog and the comments! It just seems strange to me that you’d be so one sided… on the establishment side even… of such a clear cut, new media debate.

Here’s irony for you. I read THIS post in google reader… an aggregator. If it weren’t for aggregation, there is no way I could keep up with all the good sites, including yours, that I want to read. Maybe the old media sources should look at this debate the same way.

@jtrigsby