Imitation, they say, is the greatest form of flattery, but it's no way to turn a profit.  There are folks on Open Salon and on blogs across cyberland that love to imitate the folks at the New York Times or the Washington Post, and while I'm sure the journalists there are blushing, they aren't doing it at the bank. 

A while back when I was in college, Napster was the rave.  Pirating music was fun and the ladies loved it, but it wasn't morally right, and anyone who tries to make the argument that art should be free, well, I'd love to ride a unicorn to work, but some things just aren't realistic.  

 This new fad in cutting and pasting articles is far worse than pirating music though.  When I would download a song from Napster, I never pretended that it was me singing that song, or put a minuscule hyperlinked footnote at the end of a very long song attributing it to someone else.  At least the artist benefited from getting credit for writing a good song.  Such is not the case with the cut/paste crooks.  It's straight plagiarism. 

Journalists, like musicians, should get paid for their work if it's good and if people are reading what they're writing.  I don't care who pays.  I'm cheap, I'd prefer it to not be me, the consumer, so if we can arrange that, it'd be great.  But the arguments from folks like King Kaufman, that news can survive without paid institutions creating them is straight up wrong. 

 Yes, with blogs out there the internet has, theoretically, news reporters all over the world.  Yes, those people could provide hard hitting news after working at their regular jobs.  But if you look on Open Salon, or my blog, or pretty much anyone's blog, that doesn't happen.  We go to the newspapers, or CNN, or Fox, read their articles, pull from their articles and comment on them.   This is a great, wonderful form of dialogue and it helps to keep the American dialogue going, but to think that it would exist without those news outlets providing us the information to comment on is wrong. 

 So, what's the fix?  Newspapers are dying.  They are.  I recently subscribed to the Wall Street Journal, and I am overwhelmed with the mess of cheap paper that I end up recycling everyday.  It's just outmoded.  

So, onto the internet with it's cheaper advertising and easily cut/paste format that we all know and love.  But newspapers can't survive off an income like that.  Not if they want to maintain bureaus.  Not if we, as a collective society, don't want to pay a guy to sit and watch C-Span and go ask a few questions to hold our constituents accountable. 

 This is the fix.  Scribd.com.  The PDF file is the greatest under-utilized resource out there.   With Scribd.com, the writer sets whether someone pays for content and whether they can download and, from there, cut and paste and copy and plagiarize. Better yet,  places like Scribd are going portable with e-book readers like the Kindle, so I can take it on the metro or, if things work out, that unicorn. 

Media outlets benefit because their costs are lower, yet they can still charge higher advertising rates because readers, just like in print, will have to scan across advertisements to get to their content.  

So, now that we've fixed that, maybe we can fix their obsession with reporting on Letterman's affair, or Joe Wilson, or Michelle Obama's arms and focus on things like Wall Street regulation, the war in Afghanistan, or the 2.65 billion in earmarks in the new defense spending bill (all of which, ironically, I know about thanks to them.)

 Other notes:

• If anyone would like to start a witch hunt on folks who do cut and paste, I'm all in.
• I really don't like Rupert Murdoch.