TechCrunch had an interesting link today to this article written by a newspaper industry pundit on the "Link Economy". His basic point is that the value of inbound links to news sites is overshadowed by the ability of site scrapers to use them and disintermediate the newspaper site from their readers.
Why won't newspapers realize their long term fate is sealed in the same way that the music industry's fate was sealed - if your business model has been based on controlled distribution and bundling of variable quality media units (e.g. songs on an album or stories in a newspaper) into one purchasable SKU, you'd better hope that you don't loose distribution control. Whoops!
Why won't the newspapers and the music labels realize the same basic thing: what they have on their side is the editorial (or curatorial or AR or whatever you want to call it) function. That's their bag. Monetize that! The music industry is figuring out how to do that with merch and live shows - newspapers just need to do it with their own versions of the same (e.g. Wired and New Yorker's thought leadership conferences).
I wrote about this transformation a long time ago now and i believe my arguments hold even more true today than when i wrote this:
If the NYT won't own the editorial function for news, then I guarantee you someone else will.
