Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz wrote in support of the plan and ended up in a nasty spat with guru Jeff Jarvis. The stupid and frivolous part of the spat stems from Jarvis' out-of-nowhere spitefulness and anger, about which we'll say no more here.

The substantive part of the spat, however, is worth some reflection. Schultz and others who feel likewise blame the troubles of newspapers in part on Internet aggregators—all those free riders—who steal the hard work of news outlets for their own Web hits. The columnist quotes an expert to this effect:

"Free-riding is ubiquitous. These parasitic aggregators are capturing the heart of the stories so that readers have no need to visit the site of the original story."

Damn those free riders.

Now, there's a lot of back-and-forth about this point—about whether tighter copyright rules would even be practical or whether they'd really help newspapers thrive. Opponents of the legal fix point to the Michael Jackson news of last week, arguing that it'd be crazy to suppose that TMZ, via tighter copyright rules, could somehow have retained sole custody of the information that the King of Pop had died.

Good point. A better point to rebut Schultz & Co.: We, the newspapers, are free riders too! We free-ride-aggregate all day long. That's what our blogs are all about. We, the newspapers, have spent millions upon millions of dollars trying to become more efficient, more diligent, more comprehensive free riders. We, the newspapers, spend untold hundreds of thousands of dollars at conferences and seminars in the quest to improve our free ridership. We, the newspapers, love free-riding as much as the classic sniveling, pajama'd blogger. We, the newspapers, will automate our free-riding if that'll help. We, the newspapers, will hire people to free-ride, if that'll help. We, the newspapers, will free-ride to a dead end in an industrial zone if it means more pageviews.

The Washington City Paper may be the kind of news outfit that tighter-copyright advocates seek to help. We have a reportorial staff, though it's small. We occasionally break stories. And we can use all the traffic we can get. But we also free-ride all day long. Check out today, for instance: We free-rode the Washington Post, multiple times. We free-rode ESPN. We free-rode AP. We free-rode the Examiner, just about every local TV news station, csmonitor.com, the Washington Times, and ourselves! And all of that free-riding took place before noon.

And just what does all that free-riding get us? This.

Just like the newspaper industry he criticizes so frequently, What Would Google Do? seems like an attempt to make money off of content Jarvis previously gave away for free (his blog Buzzmachine apparently wasn't generating enough Google Ads revenue to pay the bills). Reading the book, one can almost imagine Jarvis opening up Google Docs, pasting in a series of blog posts, whipping out the thesaurus (or rather, firing up the search engine) and tapping out awkward transitions between each topic like a co-ed writing a thesis paper. That "link to the rest" rule, along with many other ideas Jarvis lays out, now has a catchier title then when it was a blog post titled Cover what you do best. Link to the rest. The general point is the same – in the age where everyone is a critic, why does every paper need a local critic? The link, writes Jarvis, changes every business and institution, but it's "easiest to illustrate its impact on news.

Publisher's Weekly says the "scattered collection of rambling rants lauding Google's abilities" generally misses the mark (but they don't even offer a permalink to their review on their website, so don't expect Jarvis to take them too seriously). "While his insights are stimulating," PW notes, "Jarvis's tone is acerbic and condescending; equally off-putting is his pervasive name-dropping."

But Jarvis isn't likely to care too deeply about what the book reviewing elite has to say, he's probably more curious about his customer rating on Amazon.com (currently at 3.5 our of 5, based on six reviews). The entire mentality of What Would Google Do? focuses on the power that the internet has given average people. Jarvis embraces the democratization of news (emphasizing news organizations as networks and platforms) and may have a good grasp on where the industry is headed in the future, but even he still relies on hierarchical structures of the past. Books are just about the least Web 2.0 platforms out there (even print newspapers can offer corrections in the next issue) and you will not find a full copy of the book on his website. The praise for the book on the back cover is full of big names including Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist, and Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody – no anonymous Amazon screen names here.

But even Jarvis admits he's somewhat of a sellout who can't live up to his own ideals as he admits in the book and in an interview with Newsweek:

"First, I'll confess, I'm a hypocrite. I didn't put this book up as a purely digital, searchable, linkable entity—I didn't eat my own dog's food—because I got an advance from the publisher, and other services. Dog's gotta eat. I couldn't pass it up. In terms of the process of the book, though, I hope it was Googlier [than most] in that I thought this book through on my blog. And the great thing about the blog is the people who help me there—readers who with amazing generosity will act as peer review and challenge my ideas, and push them and fill in gaps in my knowledge."

His chapter on media focuses on the shakeups required to the instrustries profitable. He dubs newspapers "The Google Times," Hollywood "Googlewood" and the publishing industry "GoogleCollins."

Newspapers don't get off easily. In a segment of the book called Newspapers, post-paper Jarvis writes that for news organizations, going digital is not as simple as filling web pages. "This transformation requires them to reinvent themselves – how they think of themselves, how they operate, how they relate to the public, how they make money – and fast."

Overall, Jarvis' manifesto for the internet age is a interesting perspective that shakes up the status quo and advances discussion of the future of media, which is perhaps what companies need during this time of digital transition.

He says that Google's impact on media is more direct and immediate than in other industries and endorses a radical solution: "Cannibalize thyself. Convincing audience and advertisers to move to the future is better than following them there after they have discovered other sources of news." He recommend papers set a date in the not-too-distant future to turn off the presses.

Here it's clear that Jarvis is recommending newspapers abandon the print ship a bit early. Asking the news industry to abandon print when it can still make money is a bit like asking Exxon to figure out a way to make gasoline obsolete. Ultimately, the financial pressure necessary to shift newspapers online will come from competition with other news sites. Let's hope (for aspiring journalists sake) that they're not too far behind the curve.

This posting was written by an intern, who–Jeff Jarvis will be happy to hear–is unpaid and therefore not draining from the concentration of resources where they matter, even if book reviews are not what he does best.