News & Opinion

Digital Fishwrap Reconsidered By Peter Scheer In a recent commentary published here and on the Op-Ed page of the San Francisco Chronicle (“What if online portals had nothing but ‘digital fish wrap’?”), I argued that large metropolitan newspapers, in order to enhance the value of their editorial content on the internet, should consider delaying the free release of their articles online. Collective action to deprive the internet, temporarily, of free and timely news—leaving Yahoo, Google,

An intriguing idea: Maintaining the value of a besieged commodity by shifting the time frame of its use. Stephen Dubner: Not long ago, we posted here about the supposedly desperate future of newspapers. Now here’s a S.F. Chronicle column by Peter Scheer saying the same thing I tried to say, but Scheer says it better: i.e., if the future of newspapers is so bleak, why are so many smart people rushing to buy them? (The

A cure worse than the disease Dan Gillmor: Peter Scheer . . . asks, “What if online portals had nothing but ‘digital fish wrap’?” He writes: “Newspapers and wire services need to figure out a way, without running afoul of antitrust laws, to agree to embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period — say, 24 hours — after it is made available to paying customers. The point is not to

Scheer’s proposal a trap Joe Wikert: Dan Gillmor has it right. The solution for the newspaper industry’s woes isn’t to “embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period – say 24 hours.” . . . Even if the newspaper industry could band together and pull this off, what would it lead to? It probably results in a boatload of online traffic shifting from the newspaper sites to other news-oriented sites. If

An utterly numbnutty idea Jeff Jarvis: . . . [Scheer’s proposal is] an utterly numbnutty idea. . . Uh, counselor, you assume that you can still control the news. You can’t. That’s the whole point of the internet. Others can easily step into whatever void there is and report what you don’t report; you’re only opening the door for them. Oh, but they don’t have what the papers have? Look again: It’s worth cataloguing just