Zac Echola is muffin but trouble

Be it: Sasha Abramsky is wrong (and apparently, doesn’t do research)

Published on 12/03/07
by Zac Echola

I came across Sasha Abramsky’s horribly misguided treatise against the Internet by way of Romenesko today, and I have to say he is blatantly, patently, unequivocally and stupendously wrong:

Too many people are now ditching their newspaper subscriptions, relying more heavily on internet publications and online clipping services. If these organisations were recreating their own news-gathering infrastructures, that wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. The flaw in the model, however, is that businesses like Yahoo rely on news bureaus run by newspapers and other traditional news organisations, in order to reap their own headlines. They then cull these stories for audiences to whom they distribute the information free of charge.

The model works well if people use Yahoo as a secondary source - to, say, get a quick glimpse at the latest news as a supplement to their morning paper - or if only a select few use it as a primary source for news. It works terribly if a critical mass of readers cancels their newspaper subscriptions and relies exclusively on the freebies available via the web. For at that point, the financial viability of the news organisations comes into question - as it has at the LA Times - and the possibility grows of a news-gathering infrastructure breakdown. If the LA Times doesn’t generate news from places like Iraq, how will Yahoo, which doesn’t operate its own bureaus, maintain a reliable stream of professional quality reporting? In a very real way, the internet risks killing off the goose that keeps laying its golden eggs.

At the fundemental level, the thing that separates the Internet from a newspaper is links. One Web site can link to another just as easily as it can refer to itself. These links are hypertext, or simply a way for one piece of text to link to another piece of text. Because of this fundamental pillar of the Internet, I can easily travel from one document to the next with ease, bypassing the homepage of a site and move directly to the content I’d like to read.

It’s much easier than guessing at and typing in the exact address for the content I’d like to reach.

With a newspaper, you’re stuck within the confines of the medium in your hands, if you wish to leave that medium at breakfast on a Sunday morning, your best bet is to look up at the cereal ingredients on Marshmallow Mateys box on the kitchen table. But there’s no connection between the two sources of information, no link between them, if you will.

Earth shattering, I know, but hear me out.

Yahoo! primarily gets its news from services like Associated Press and Reuters, unfortunately like too many newspapers are getting much of their news now.

But Yahoo! takes their news aggregation a step further. A year ago, Yahoo! realized that much of their news came off the backs of newspaper beat journalists pounding the pavement, so they launched something similar to what Google news had been doing all along: They began providing links to these news gathering sources.

Hardly seems like a parasitic proposition to me. Do you see why?

ven diagram

Also note that when the balls don’t touch, Yahoo! doesn’t get any content from your Web site, either. When they do touch–or rather, overlap–Yahoo! gets content (in effect, they get reporters overseas and at the local water commission hearings all over the country) and the news sources tap into a huge, HUGE audience which drives traffic and ultimately increases ad sales for “free” content. That’s symbiosis, baby!

In other words, the Internet makes sweet love to the golden goose and together they lay magic golden eggs and wrap them with a silk bow.

B-b-b-but where are the greyhairs dictating the order of our reporters’ news? Ha ha, my dear friends, please recall hypertext, that wonderful thing that led me from Google to Romenesko to Abramsky: I bypassed all that dictation nonesense, following a network of trust. The news isn’t linear anymore. I can come and go as I please, which is something I imagine people do when averting their eyes from the Sunday metro section to cereal box, anyway. Only with the Web, we follow relevent paths to relevent information.

Granted, Yahoo! News UK & Ireland doesn’t have this feature yet, so Abramsky may be simply looking in the wrong place, hardly an excuse to shake off the Internet as a parasitic money-grabber.

The end. Or is it?

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