Mathew Ingram points to a fascinating deal Gogle has pulled off with the major wire services:

As I understand it, the arrangement between Google and Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, the British Press Association and Canadian Press will see the content from those wire services appear on Google News with the logo of the wire service prominently displayed, and Google has agreed to give the wires’ version of a story prominence over the thousands of versions of that story that appear on the websites of the various newspapers that are members of AP, AFP, etc.

Now, open up an arbitrary newspaper - notice how many stories are just AP/Reuters (etc) copy/paste jobs? What about Op/Ed, you say? Well, if the blogosphere is anything at all, it's a reputation based op/ed system. What does that leave newspapers? Well, I've been saying that they are going to have to go deeply local for awhile now - and that probably means that they are going to have to get a lot smaller - their stringers are going to be the local bloggers who actually want to attend local school board meetings, high school sports - the things that the big wire services aren't going to cover.

Welcome to the new world of media - it's going to look an awful lot like the 18th and 19th century versions, I think.

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