A Scenario for News

A year ago I was a huge raving fan of Jeff Jarvis and his theories about what "the new news" will look like.

Then I just spent the last year actually creating a metro news site and watching carefully to see what other folks are doing.

I still admire the guy's verve, but he's dead wrong about "write what you do best and link to the rest."

News organizations that take this advice will be at an immediate disadvantage against the Huffington Post's, Gothamists and Gawkers of the world. While the Jarvis-ites are linking to stuff, these other sites are copy and pasting 1-2 paragraphs from the original story, tossing a few sentences before and after the quote and the passing it off to Google as an original article.

Google eats it up and sends them traffic.

Meanwhile, when it looks at your links, it classifies them as just links and sends you no traffic.

In today's online news environment, you must steal to get ahead or even to just stay in the game.

Jarvis needs to take a year off and try to actually start a news site. Let him see how it really works.