I think Matt Asay makes a fundamental mistake in agreeing with this comment by Robert Thomson from a Poynter Online piece:

But one of the -- Google -- I mean, the harsh way of just defining it, Google devalues everything it touches. Google is great for Google, but it's terrible for content providers, because it divides that content quantitatively rather than qualitatively. And if you are going to get people to pay for content, you have to encourage them to make qualitative decisions about that content.

That's just completely wrong. What Google does is pretty simple - it makes it easier to find content that gets "voted up" by linkage. If news sites aren't findable through that mechanism, then it says a lot about those news sites - people simply aren't reading them and linking to them. You can dislike that relationship all you want, but it's real. What it means is that news brands are relatively weak. If you have a strong brand (like, say, Engadget) - then lots of people flock to your site.

The problem is this: the days of generalist news are ending. The death of newspapers is a symptom of that. Why do we go to Engadget during events like CES? Because we know that they'll have comprehensive, focused coverage on the tech/gadget niche. What are most papers focused on?

There's a reason that the Wall Street Journal is doing better than most of their paper bound competition - they cover a focused niche (market news). The Washington Post, or the NY Times (etc)? None of them have a focused niche, and in the online news market that's being born, that's a problem.

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