The Doctor's prescription: sharing

Ken Doctor proposes a “Fair Share” plan that would require Google to share its revenue with the content providers that are enabling it to generate billions of dollars:

We’re not saying Google doesn’t serve money for its magic. We’re just saying it should fairly share the wealth. What’s fair? Well, some percentage of gross revenues. As big as the web business has become, it’s only in its infancy. Online advertising will continue to outpace ad spend overall, and content producers want to get on the ramp.

Doctor makes a few compelling arguments, e.g., Google News is responsible for a large chunk of the $21.7 billion Google took in annual revenue in 2008. But this just feels like yet another plan that tries to avoid what the netizens are saying is impossible in an “information wants to be free” world:  that it’s time for news sites to charge for content.

Reinventing the newspaper

I know what you’re thinking (cause I”m clairvoyant like that): “Not again. Not another post on how to save newspapers.” Ah, but this one is pretty darn good, tapping into the wisdom of 10 experts who offer advice on how to keep the presses rolling. Here are a few of the highlights:

On reinventing the core product:

Leonsis: [Develop] a core competency in ad sales so that the organization can represent other local media companies to build scale and create mini advertising.com-like businesses in each market.

On the audience for newspapers:

Mutter: Editors and publishers need to adopt a zero-based, market-driven approach to what they do. They need to learn to ask their readers and nonreaders what they want—and then respond creatively to the answers.

On the role of the print product:

Hall: Print is good at the things the Web is not good at—watchdog, explanatory, enterprise, narrative storytelling. The two media complement one another. One is the flowing river, changing constantly; the other is the rock on the shore, fixed and solid.

On reinventing the newspaper to work in concert with online offerings: