Gooogle is passé and comment is free

Google is now in danger of being pass? - as a purely mechanical way of finding information

Says Alan Rushbridger Editor of the Guradian

Further

And just to be “really terrifying”, hundreds of sites are scraping the ads out of sites and aggregating them.

The Guardian looked at the phenomenon of how people are looking to these technical aggregators. So for instance, “Overheard in the UK” has had 457,000 visits in the last month.

“Comment used to be our field. Now there are web sites for fragmented audiences who want stuff they are interested in by people who are like them… However fragmented you want to be, it can be done better than a newspaper. What does a newspaper do?”

Rusbridger said that he decided to launch a new Guardian site, “Comment is Free”, after seeing how a liberal-minded blog in the US, The Huffington Post, a had overtaken The New Republic, The Nation, Mother Jones and The New Yorker in web traffic.

All of this content is created for free.

Further

But for a society to work well, citizens have to be informed across a range of subjects. Politicians, in fact, would find it hard to govern without informed citizens. And newspapers stand outside government and can critique it.

Rusbridger drew on an anecdote about a dinner he attended where representatives form the highest levels of politics, the military and judiciary were present, just after the Iraq war.

“One by one they said we all failed. All the parts if the state that were supposed to work didn’t. The only thing that did work was newspapers and broadcasters.”

In an age where some parts of the world remain no-go areas to ordinary people, like Baghdad, it’s newspapers which are sending reporters like Jonathon Steel, 67, who said “he wanted to go. What happens if all the journalists pull out? There’s a duty to go. There’ aren’t any bloggers volunteering to go.”

“I will never lose sight of the role of newspapers and their role,” said Rusbridger. “In some ways it’s the most exciting time to be in newspapers. There’s a revolution as big as Gutenberg and Caxton going on, but in many ways it’s also frightening.”

Via Mike Butcher