It’s early and I’m still working on my coffee(s) but two points I wuld like to make.

One: as stated by Jason Calcanis in his post “That has no impact on Google’s bottom line–they make their money from people running Google Adsense on their websites and Google’s own sites. ”

Google’s stated mission is to index all the worlds information and newspapers are a prominent part of that information. That said though Google doesn’t make money in their traditional manner (AdSense) on the Google News pages. So on the face of it this is a free service to the end user.

Second: I read your post and if I understand you correctly (remembering the lack of caffeine) we both agree that the real threat to the newspaper industry is the growing snapshot reading habits of our society for which news aggregaters like Google News is a perfect fit.

Thanks TDavid I appreciate the catch … now do you have anything for rubbing off the word idiot from one’s forehead??

By driving up links to newspaper Web sites, loads of remnant inventory is created on those sites. Since local advertisers have no interest in these one-off page views, the remnant space is most often filled with Google AdSense ads. This isn’t coincidence. Google understands the effect of driving up remnant inventory via Google News.

All multi-billion dollar companies are in it for the money, Google included. They’re not featuring Google News prominently on their ever-so-sparse home page just to be nice.

And on a related note: Before dismissing him, consider for a moment that the billionaire has some experience and insight of value. I actually think Sam Zell has a point, and I’ve explained why on my blog.

Sure I may have made my point but beside the fact that it probably won’t have attracted the attention of a Wahington Post journalist how else would you phrase an article that was factually incorrect. Facts that even a cub reporter or better yet a [gasp] blogger [/gasp] would have verified - much like Jason Calacanis did.

What I wrote did nothing to denegrate either yourself or Karl in anything beyond the scope of an article about a billionaire who pays more journalist paychecks than either of us can imagine.

And don’t get me wrong - I have the great most respect for any journalist who has reported on Iraq - even if most of them didn’t have the backbone to report about the truth in the beginning of the whole mess rather than towing the Adminstration line under free of being labelled unpatriotic.

As far as your article on Sam Zell if either of you had taken a minute to check the facts of what he both said and implied you would have seen that what was said by Mr. Zell was incorrect and that should have been pointed out as well.

I believe my old editor would have called it fact checking.

On the off chance you do read this thank you very much for dropping by and I do apologize if my comments appeared to insinuate anything about character beyond the scope of the article in question.