API Thinks they are Humpty Dumpty? No wonder they Dead Men Walking

Now that is quite a poor analogy if you ask me.

So the remedy for putting the pieces back together according to the API: charge for content, stick it to Google, and renegotiate subscription models with Amazon for the Kindle (which it implies is unfairly making more money from content than newspapers). Apparently, nobody at the API has actually read Humpty Dumpty, otherwise they would know that you can never put the pieces back together again.

Yeah TechCrunch is 100% right. All of the Kings Horses and all of the Kings men couldn't put Humpty back together again. Is this an admission that they can never get their revenue model back on track no matter what they do?

IMO charging for newspaper content is asinine and is a recipe for failure in the long term. Information will simply flow from the paid content to the free content since information is fairly fungible.

Why do you need to link to a New York Times article when you can link to free information on Fox News or CNN sites. The opinion writers of record might even gravitate toward the online space (or even self publish) in the future if they are paid decently enough.

It is the distribution costs and how younger consumers prefer to access this information is what is killing the newspaper. Also Craigslist killing their classified section doesn't help.

The newspapers also have some kind of anti-Google mania going on as well:

In order to seek compensation from Google, the API suggests that news organizations should put legal, political, business and technological pressure on Google, and other “powerful players” in the digital space including MSFT, Yahoo, AOL, and Facebook.

That’s right. Part of the plan is for newspapers, which are technologically challenged, to put “technological pressure” on the technology giants. That plan is even less likely to succeed than the Humpty Dumpty one.

Google could easily retaliate by investing some of their $10 billion in cash in a Google News Service if the newspapers play hard-ball on prices. Hell they could buy one or more of the bankrupt papers and sell off all of the printing presses and trucks and just employ the reporters as online correspondents if they wanted to. They would then charge other news sources to access that information or just use this service as yet another platform to offer targeted advertising.

There is no compelling reason that the information that these newspapers generate must be given to the consumer via a bundle of paper delivered to your home by some kid. Digital ink and Kindle can just as easily link to a fictitious Google News Services Worldwide as they can link to the New York Times.