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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Frank Gruber points to Fred Wilson, who says that MySpace is the “AOL of Blogging.”

Frank, who recently joined AOL in the Product Development area for blogging and RSS, agrees a bit, but I think he neglects to point out the most important point that Fred brings up.

It’s something I’ve been saying about MySpace for a while and it’s very relevant to Tribune (where Frank and I met) and other newspaper and media sites trying to embrace social networking.

The point is, that if MySpace tries to create a walled-garden like AOL did, at some point their users will awaken and the MySpace service will either begin a slow decline, or they will recognize it and open up, like AOL did recently.

And so far, it’s looking like AOL did the right thing.

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Jonathan, over at Web 2.0 newspapers , adds a bit to the argument traveling around lately about newspapers and communities. I highly doubt there is person reading his blog or this one who doesn’t think he’s right.
It’s funny, because even the most clueless newspaper people I know wouldn’t deny that online community is important, even if they weren’t sure what it meant.

As I mention in a comment on Jonathan’s post, the difference between now and five years ago, when I was yelling “community!” at my newspaper, is this.

Then, we should have been trying to create a community. Now, we need to think about joining them.

Then, slashdot. Now, blogosphere. Next, Jabber.

Whuh? That’s right, folks. Like Stowe Boyd (who graciously auctioned www.podosphere.com off to me -yeehah) says, :”The Buddylist is the Center of the Universe” .

And Gtalk supports Jabber, and all players will eventually melt down to interop, and any social network can be built on top of the presence of IM.

This is not a publishing medium, it’s communication. Whether you publish and subscribe, store and forward, use voice, text or avatar, you need one identity, one voice. IM will be open in Second Life as well as on the desktop.
When IM adds a store and forward component, email is dead and the game is over. Pure conversation.

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