the lion's share of the aggregation market with an attractive layout and a number of value added features. Yes, Domaining.com (created by Francois Carrillo) benefits from having the vast majority of its content produced at no charge by other people. However, I think just about all 

of us whose work is headlined on Carrillo's site feel like we get equal value in return as Domaining.com sends readers back to our sites where they can read the full article (and often stick around to check out other pages). It is a two way street that benefits both sides.

Mark Cuban

Lyons writes, "The aggregators and the old-media guys are competing for the same advertising dollars. But the aggregators compete using content that the old-media guys create and give to them at no cost. This is insane, right? It's like fighting a war and supplying the enemy with guns and bullets." He thinks Cuban had it right in a blog post that Lyons summarized in this paragraph, "The media companies should kill off these parasites by using a little piece of software that blocks incoming links from aggregators. If the aggregators can't link to other people's stories, they die. With a few lines of code, the old-media guys could snuff them out."

I don't think anything better illustrates the differences between old media and new than 

that. Everyone who publishes on the web goes out of their way to get inbound links - traditional outlets want to kill them - even though those links lead people to their online properties which may be the only lifeboat they have left. Go figure.

Another big thing I see missing from the strategy that Cuban and Lyons advocate is exactly how killing off this major source of inbound traffic would keep traditional media outlets alive? How would having less traffic help them make more money so they could keep their doors open? Lyons wrote, "I'm not sure it would work, but I'd love to see someone try, just to see what happens." My guess is that what would happen would be their publications seeing even fewer readers than they have now, accelerating their extinction rather than staving it off. I understand why old media wants to retaliate against the forces that have put such a hurting on them - its human nature, but this sounds like a classic case of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Still old media is in such dire straits that they have to try to find some kind of life raft even if it means grasping at straws like this. As it happens, I still subscribe to Lyons' print publication, Newsweek, so I know that they have already made a drastic move this year in a last ditch effort to keep their audience. They stopped reporting the news. Can you imagine - a magazine called Newsweek - one with a long and storied history of covering and analyzing all of the world's major news events - no longer covers the news.

It's true. They apparently decided that since everyone can get news stories online at no cost, they won't keep paying Newsweek to get basically the same information days later. So, while their arch rival Time is (at least for now) staying the course, Newsweek has become an essay magazine. They hope that original pieces with a news theme produced by their stable of writers will give them something unique and attractive enough that people will pay for it. 

          My latest copy of Newsweek
It's good that they block out the word "News" on the masthead because the magazine gave up on news and went to an all-essay format earlier this year.

For me the new format is a big swing and a miss. I liked what they were doing before which is why I subscribed in the first place. Yes, the basic news had already been released before their magazine came out, but I felt they added value by putting the world's events into context with fresh analysis and insight each week. What they are doing now is not what I paid for and not something I am interested in getting. Kind of like I bought a Cadillac only to find a Yugo in the garage a few months later. When my subscription expires next July I won't be renewing.