The Future Of Newspapers

A dry, but interesting essay calling for newspapers to unite in some sort of socialistic enterprise to let them compete on a worldwide scale with all the other Internet companies. There's good stuff here, but the proposal is absurd and the author is wrong to pinpoint the "failure" of newspapers to come up with Websites like Google and MySpace. That's not what newspapers do (create new businesses) and if they tried to do it they wouldn't do it well. Newspapers create content and they can indeed do a much better job of exploiting that content and being more user friendly (with comment sections, RSS feeds, links to related articles, blogs and so on). But trying to unite an entire industry in a business mode that would probably violate anti-trust laws? Trying to launch new web businesses? Uh-uh.