web content

Alan Mutter has an incisive analysis explaining why an all-digital strategy would be unacceptably painful for the majority of established newspapers:

In what many of us thought was a slightly bizarre case, the New York Times Co. has settled with GateHouse Media in a suit attempting to cease the automated aggregation of Gatehouse content on Boston.com's affiliated properties (Boston.com is owned by the Times Co.). It is not clear why the settlement was reached, since precedence was on the side of the Times' operation.

Lev Grossman takes a pragmatic look at the changing state of authors, readers, and the definition of publishing:

Self-publishing has gone from being the last resort of the desperate and talentless to something more like out-of-town tryouts for theater or the farm system in baseball. It's the last ripple of the Web 2.0 vibe finally washing up on publishing's remote shores. After YouTube and Wikipedia, the idea of user-generated content just isn't that freaky anymore.

A judge has dismissed lawsuits from Amazon and Overstock.com challenging New York's "Amazon tax," which was enacted last year. From the Associated Press:

The law applies to companies that don't have offices in New York, but have at least one person in the state who works as an online agent -- someone who links to a Web site and receives commissions for related sales.

Fortune Magazine has an interesting interview with Eric Schmidt about Google's relationship with newspapers:

Maybe their time [newspapers'] has just come and gone?

In a column at Slate, Jack Schafer says newspapers' overcommitment to form and content lock-in led to the industry missing Web opportunities: