These days, any one can publish. High school kids have their own blogs, publishing their own creativity. Especially when people are starting to understand google’s algorithm. Professional journalist with ‘REAL’ content are struggling to compete against ‘Adsense earners’ who don’t have real content but know how to get their page ranked no.1 in google.

I think this change should be much more frustrated. And i sense that another change will be brought into the flow of information highway again very soon.
Big Change. With BING enters the market. I’m sure google will change their algorithm again, and let’s see….whose content…despite the technology used to create it, will get to be ‘saw’ by millions of people using search engines.

It’s also interesting to note your followup clarification about the split between what publishers perceived as recurrent operating costs and one-time capital outlay. A lack of understanding, one would assume, about the differences between the initial heavy lifting to lay a foundation, those things which are going to be anticipated costs to make a news site evolve as technology changes, and those things which are day-to-day expenses. There also needs to be factored into this the lack of a tangible business model to make the news site be self-supporting at a quality level equivalent to the print product. Something which is still unresolved.

That said, it should be also noted that we are now working with the benefit of hindsight, and that some of the decisions made by news publishers more than a decade ago probably made perfect sense at the time. That they were proved wrong is because technology went in a direction no one could have anticipated. It also seems to me a more important question is what to do about it now. How do you jettison existing dysfunctional baggage and replace it with something better for the longer term? My own ideas for fundamental change tend to go something like this:

The news industry needs to move beyond the idea of using proprietary vendors or custom solutions to build and maintain websites. For the sake of its own survival there needs to be a cooperative effort among publishers to develop a standard reference, an online news publishing platform using an open source model. If Wikipedia and WordPress can do it, why can’t news publishers?

I could have missed it, but have yet to see any common online forum for discussion on those topics related to the broader view of the coding process involved in putting news online. Late last month, for example, Every Block released its Python source code and the event breezed by with very little mention.

One of the major reasons the online news business model is broken is because legacy advertising models don’t work anymore. Instead of having print “up-sell” to the web, online news sites should be moving into marketing services to help local merchants sell stuff. There is a huge untapped realm out there of possibilities but so far what we’re seeing is news organizations waiting around until somebody else invents something.

but…

I think that this has nothing to do with why newspapers are tanking. It is the indeed the distribution model change. Like record labels failed to adjust to how music is now distributed, so goes it for newspapers.

Book Publisher are next.