In an article for Yahoo News recently, News Does Not Want to be Free, cartoonist and writer Ted Rall, a previous finalist for the Pulitzer prize, recommends three solutions to rescue a desperate American print newspaper industry. The first two are that newspapers should only be available offline, and that every story should be copyrighted to prevent reporting of the same story in other media. A number of commentators, particularly Mike Resnick in Techdirt pointed out that Rall is being (to put it politely) less than realistic. One implication of Rall's modest proposal is that as soon as any newspaper across the planet reports any story, they effectively own the facts! The guy is clearly a little delusional. The question is why he was published, and why he is so desperate.

But before looking at this, I'll try to be fair, and quote an argument in favour of the print media that Rall makes rather coherently:

Newsgathering requires extensive infrastructure. Beat reporters, freelancers, editors, stringers, fact-checkers, and travel cost a lot of money. (A week in rural Afghanistan costs at least $10,000.) Why shouldn't newspapers--the main newsgathering organizations in the United States--be compensated for those expenses?

What Rall doesn't say is that newspapers also get a lot of news from blogs. Moreover, blogs do have a lot of infrastructure -- the web, the readership and the comment system. These in fact largely do the job of the editor and the fact checkers. There are also people in all kinds of “hotspots”, for examples soldiers, policemen, translators, and officials, who may not currently be allowed to blog, but for whom a way will be found. Nor does Rall really explain why online media businesses cannot support enough infrastructure to do a good job. The article is, after all, written for Yahoo News.

I think Rall is desperate because the change is well underway and, like other print journalists, he now sees that it is inevitable and rather threatening, and so can do little else but plead for special protection. But rather than again going into the merits of the change and the future of print vs online newspaper vs blog, I would like just to pick out a couple of results that are emerging from this change.

The first is influence. Although most people as much on radio and newspaper as TV at their news, newspapers carry a lot of weight. If they are now part of a news mesh that includes the whole range of online media, these media are now real players in social and political as well as business thinking. I think that Obama's campaign shows that, at least in the US, this has now effectively happened.

The second is the implication that information in all spheres of life – not just technical, selling or entertainment – is going to become increasingly interactive, as feeds, aggregation, commenting, sharing, mashups and even microblogging become standard patterns of communication. Not in a matter of months, perhaps, but fast enough that step changes can be better measured in months than years. The winners from this change will be those that keep in step!