Jeff Jarvis' fake speech to the NAA

Jeff Jarvis on the speech he would give to the NAA (Newspaper Association of America), at their conference in San Diego.

Jarvis, on his usual 'changing industry' high (which is brilliant), chastises the old barons of the newspaper industry in the USA for not changing. Some more names than Murdoch would be welcome, and again, there is some vagueness over new web business models - but there always is, that's the point.

An extract:

"Yesterday, you delivered a foot-stomping little hissy fit over Google and aggregators. How dare they link to you and not pay you? Oh, I so want Eric Schmidt to tell you today that you’re getting your wish and that Google will no longer link to you. Beware what you wish for. You’d lose a third of your traffic overnight. If other aggregators (I work with one) and bloggers (I am one) and Facebook all decided to follow suit, you’d lose half your traffic. On most of your sites, only 20 percent of the audience in a day ever sees your homepage and its careful packaging; 4 of 5 readers instead come in through search and links."

As I mentioned in reaction to Henry Porter's article, Google doesn't have to link to news sites - and nor do the rest of us. Jarvis is pretty accurate on user experience of websites too, from my perspective. I have about four news websites I look at everyday (BBC, Guardian, Telegraph, CNN), and most of my other links and news come from Google Reader and it's subsequent links, (or not, seeing as how I often can see the whole post through Reader: there are plenty of the websites themselves I rarely look at).

Another extract:

"You all remember the quote from a college student in The New York Times a year ago, the one that has kept you up at night. Let’s say it together: “If the news is that important, it will find me.” What are you doing to take your news to her? You still expect her to come to you - to your website or to the newsstand - just because of the magnetic pull of your old brand. But she won’t, and you know it. You lost an entire generation. You lost the future of news.

You blew it."

As long as someone is linked up with the tools, perhaps the news will come to them, though they need to allow it to reach them first.

Related posts:
Henry Porter on Google
Walter Issacon on the Daily Show
Tim Luckhurst on buying a newspaper 'for democracy'