Peter Wayner gave an interesting talk at Google pointing out the downsides of the decline in print journalism and suggesting some things that might be done about it. Here’s one of his ideas:

Let me say that I’m a big believer in fair use. I think it’s very important for people to be able to quote frequently and liberally. But some blogs take this to an extreme. It’s easy to find blogs that are 80, 90, even 95 percent borrowed text. Some frequently cut huge chunks of an article and then wrap it with the thinnest amount of comment. Not surprisingly, some of these folks are big believers in “fair use”. I can think of one blog where the writers spend more time agitating for fair use than they do writing their thin, snarky wrapper around huge blocks of borrowed text.

I don’t think these sites are necessarily bad, but I think they end up taking an unfair amount of the return on the content. Many sell ads and some even support nice lifestyles without consuming too much shoe leather in gathering the content.

So why not add another term to the exponentially growing PageRank equation. Declan McCullagh suggested this during dinner last night. Why not compute the fraction of the text that’s original and the fraction that’s borrowed? This is possible to do because most bloggers are kind enough to include a link to the original text. If they don’t, it’s usually possible for a few searches of complete sentences to find the original.

Let’s call this LeechRank. If 20% of the text is borrowed, let’s do nothing to the PageRank. If 50% is borrowed, we bump them down a few notches. If 80% is borrowed, let’s send them down 20 to 30 notches. And if 100% is borrowed, as some pirates do, well, let’s just knock them straight out to the bottom of the listings, sort of a way station on their trip to the circle in hell reserved for people who steal and destroy a person’s livelihood.

This is a very thoughtful speech. It highlights the fact that while the Web and the blogosphere can easily provide much of the crap (celeb gossip, lifestyle journalism, infotainment) that takes up so much space in today’s newspapers, there’s no indication yet that it could replace the expensive investigating and reporting that responsible newspapers (and broadcasters) do. In the UK, for example, Jonathan Aitken would have gone unpunished if the Guardian hadn’t taken a very risky legal stand and contested his libel action against the paper. The same thing happened recently when Alan Rusbridger challenged a gagging injunction that the Government had clapped against reporting a development in the “cash for honours” investigation.

Who in the emerging ecosystem will do things — take risks — like that? Google? Perish the thought.

I like the idea of a LeechRank!

Thanks to Tim O’Reilly for pointing me to the piece.

Peter Wilby, writing in the New Statesman, has picked up on my rant about why young people don’t like newspapers — and taken the argument a useful step further. Here’s part of what he says:

Newspapers have never been good at picking up and responding positively to major social and cultural shifts

The Observer’s internet columnist John Naughton spoke the truth to the Society of Editors annual conference in Glasgow this month. Young people aren’t buying newspapers, he said, because the press portrays them as “hateful, spiteful, antisocial” criminals. To that, I would add that newspapers portray the schools, colleges and universities young people attend as incompetent and ill-disciplined. With standards plummeting, according to the press, A-levels and degrees aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Half the courses are in joke subjects.

School leavers are illiterate and unemployable. The only decent young people, apart from soldiers, are those killed or beaten up by the savage creatures who make up most of their peer group.

Then there’s drugs and sex. You will find lots of pieces discussing the pros and cons of tobacco and alcohol, but cannabis and ecstasy are simply damned without reservation. Evidence that anybody under 18 is even thinking about sex – or being encouraged by teachers to do so – is taken as a sure sign of social disintegration. As for fellatio, news editors probably think it sends you blind.

A handful of columnists, such as the Independent’s Johann Hari and Catherine Townsend and the London Evening Standard’s Laura Topham, give an authentic hint of young people’s attitudes and daily lives. But they are lone voices among what resembles a chorus of maiden aunts, circa 1953…

Great stuff. Thanks to Roy Greenslade for the link.

As I noted earlier, Andrew Neil gave the Keynote Address to the Society of Editors conference in Glasgow, in the course of which he argued that newspapers that don’t embrace online media are doomed.

During the Q&A at the end, a smart journalist named Donna Leigh asked a simple question. If he was right about the urgency of going online, how did he explain the continuing success of the Daily Mail which, to date, has rather avoided Cyberspace?

It was interesting to see that Brillo Pad was unable to deal with the question — and indeed reverted to type by suggesting that he and the questioner (an attractive woman) might discuss it further, er, later. (I’m sure that was entirely innocent, but it brought to mind the famous observation of one of his subordinates at the Sunday Times that “if you couldn’t f*** it or plug it in then he [Neil] wasn’t interested”.)

Anyway, Roy Greenslade has returned to the issue raised by Ms Leigh. Here’s part of what he has to say:

The undeniable truth is that the Mail, as the questioning Leigh correctly said, has been defying the overall downward trend that’s affected the rest of the market, and that does deserve some explanation. Neil pointed out its professionalism and its attention to editorial detail. I could have added that it has positioned itself perfectly in that bit of the market which has grown in the past 20 years, the working class who have aspired to be middle class (and largely achieved it). It also purveys the values of the middle class, a commonsensical conservatism allied to a pervasive sense that those values are under attack. Unlike the red-tops below it, it has maintained a sense of dignity. Unlike the serious papers, it has embraced populism without appearing to find it somehow distasteful. It has also – and Neil also noted this – benefited from the collapse of its middle-market competition in the shape of the Daily Express.

In other words, the Mail (and its successful Mail on Sunday stablemate) is living on the laurels of long-run demographic change and its clever identification with the people who have lived through it. That change may have reached its zenith or, just possibly, may yet have a little way to go. But the Mail’s success, having inured it to the circulation problems suffered by other papers, meant that it didn’t see the point of investing some much time and energy (and money) in digital platforms. Now, belatedly, it is doing so.

I may be wrong, but I don’t think the delay will necessarily have a negative effect on the Mail’s future. It will surely have learned from the lessons of those papers that have pioneered online journalism. But the really interesting factor is the conservatism of the current Daily Mail audience and the likelihood that fewer young people will be drawn to its values and its agenda.