Google: We Have 'Moral' Duty to Help Journalism

You can have my newspaper when you pry it from my cold dead fingers, you god-damned ape!

LOL!

Newspapers are making the same kind of mistake railroads made in the 30s - The railroad owners thought they were in the railroad business when in fact it was the transportation business. Now newspapers are demonstrating the same near-sightedness.

Rocket is right, and so is DZ. Everyone knows these two points now, though. The problem is how to deliver the news and make money off of it. With the rise of the ePub format, we can finally put out an ebook/enewspaper and have it read on nearly any device -- ebook reader, smartphone, smartbook, or PC - - well, anything except the Kindle, at the moment . . . that will be fixed soon . . . So, we are getting the distribution chain set up now. It could practically work now. Enough of us have these devices and access to the net, we could sustain the publishing industry. Still, though, why would we depend on the news sources that require payment? Everything I've listed above also works with free sources. The two choices to inject money into this stream is (1) include advertising in the publishing stream more effectively. Maybe google can help overcome the technical hurdles in this. We want to be able to *easily* mark an interesting ad and follow it up later -- on a bigger screen at home, perhaps. This will be easily accomplished. I don't know, but it seems that maybe advertising just can't produce enough revenue. Maybe news stories are too information rich, time sensitive, and expensive to produce to be monetized the same way as a blog . . . And (2) a walled garden of sorts with enough good news sources behind the wall that we will pay to get in. Imagine the iTunes Store and the Android Marketplace having an enhanced news section. Access to the best of the NY Times, WSJ, Time Magazine, Home Jewelry Making, Soldier of fortune, etc. All available only to subscribers. This would work -- even today this would work. All that's needed is for the content companies to gather into one or more guilds, set their rates, and close off all their free stuff down to a trickle. If the big news sources start, the rest can join later. Revenue would be divided based on users reading choices. Problem solved.