Interesting article. I’d read the whole thing.

In short, a bunch of anonymous claims that online folks should have a greater leadership role in newspaper organizations.

They are speaking mostly of editorial, but I’d say it’s even more important for the business/strategy side to be run by folks who grasp the technology. After all, if you don’t understand something like RSS, how can you envision using it to make money, or even realize it’s the most important initiative we have in front of us. There is no getting around the fact that we are managing a software product.

Like Gretzky said, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

On a more immediate note, the article touches upon something I’ve been debating for a while.

“. . .We live in a Google economy, where a wealth of news and information is at our fingertips. There’s simply too much available, so easily and free, for it to make sense for most news companies to charge for most of their content. ”

Which makes me think, I strongly believe that if every article newspapers ever published online was still available at it’s original location, their monthly traffic would be double what it is today. Maybe more.

I see no reason why ad programs like Google would not scale monetarily with traffic, which means they’d probably be  bringing in double  the amount of revenue from those programs.

Which leads to the question of whether  that sum would be  greater than the potential sum of sold archives. I think it would be, but time will tell.

In addition, there is the unmeasurable other 99.99% of the visitors to those pages that won’t click a google ad, but appreciate our content being available.

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