newsman

Newspapers vs. Aggregators: Understanding the Economics of the Internet

Mr. Jarvis pretends that aggregation is about commenting upon or linking to work produced by others, when it's really about outright theft. I'm a newspaper reporter, and I'll tell you how it works.
I write a story, maybe the product of several hours' work or several days', and we post it on our web site. Five minutes later, the first four or five paragraphs of my story, with a similar headline, appears on a local aggregator site, followed by a link to my story.
So, both of our sites have my story, with a headline and several graphs of copy, followed by a link to read more. Our site ate all the expense for my work. Their site stole my work.
While the copyright law, as described by Jarvis, sounds absurd, aggregators are a genuine problem.

Apple Netbook Will Fill Newspaper Void

Apple's device, whatever it is, would be just one more way to READ the news, which is primarily produced by reporters guess where? Newspapers.
If newspapers go away, as so many people now want to predict, the flow of reporting also dries up on the internet, as well as tv and radio (which get much of their material from newspapers as well).
The internet isn't a source of news, just a way to access it. Someone, in the end, has to finance the gathering of news.