What’s funny to me is that this whole Zell vs. The Internet, et. all meme didn’t blow up until the Washington Post published the story.

It was first reported in Zell’s own paper, The LA Times, where I talked about it here.

How does this bode, on a purely metaphysical level, for the future of Tribune Company?

Deep Jive Interest made some great points here (also in my link blog [RSS]) about Google making news a commodity.

I plan to touch on this and why bloggers may have linked to the Post article later tonight.

Stay tuned, friends!

Edit: Fixed the RSS link for my link blog.

Saw this via Romenesko this morning:

Journalists produce the news that search engines such as Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. seamlessly and freely make available to anyone with a computer, Zell said during a presentation on corporate governance at Stanford University. “If all the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content for nothing, what would Google do, and how profitable would Google be?” the Chicago real estate maverick mused.

His answer: Not very.

Steal?

Indexing is now theft? That’s a bit ridiculous. I’d like to see if news Web sites could survive without referral traffic from search engines. I’d speculate all newspapers get on average of 15% to 25% of their traffic from search engines. Which could result in huge losses in value of Web sites in the eyes of advertisers, if these sites were suddenly cut off from the traffic generator.

But to call links with headlines (which is all Google uses) and with briefs (like Topix or Yahoo!) stealing is beyond gall. It a blasphemous misunderstanding of Internet basics.

There’s been a lot of fawning chatter the past few days about how Zell is going to save the American newspaper. Well, with that kind of attitude I’m going to have to assume his plans are actually to run it into the ground.