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“Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form.”

The former basketball coach and Peter Boyle (as Young Frankenstein) lookalike immediately qualified his comments, of course, saying that “If it’s 14 or if it’s 8, it’s immaterial to my fundamental point.” So there you have it. The end of the newspaper, as foretold by the guy whose company completely missed the importance of the Internet, not to mention the importance of Web-search, and about a dozen other things I don’t have time to go into. No doubt Microsoft will help out with Newspaper 2.0, a piece of shrink-wrapped software that only costs $350 and takes a Pentium Quad Core and 3GB of memory to run.

Seriously though, this is the kind of thing people say to get attention — and I’m not just saying that because I happen to be employed by a newspaper. If anything, I am even more convinced of the digital revolution that Steve is. But will newspapers as we know them disappear in 10 years? No. And not in 14 years either — or 20 for that matter. Will a lot fewer people be reading a printed paper than read one daily now? Undoubtedly. I got asked about the future of papers as part of a panel discussion on recommendation engines at mesh 2008 a few weeks ago, and I said what I always say: I think lots of people will continue reading papers — just not as many as are reading now.

People still listen to the radio, don’t they? Many of them listen to talk shows, and “radio plays” that consist of actors in a studio somewhere reading their lines. Lots of people still go to live theatre, and to the opera for that matter — heck, people still read books, and that technology is hundreds of years old. But not as many people do those things as used to do them when those forms of entertainment were at their peak. I think it will be exactly the same with newspapers — I fully expect to see people reading them for the remainder of my lifetime; they will just be fewer in number, and younger folk will see them as quaint.

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Why did the paper decide to drop the wall? Without going into too much detail, my understanding is that we did it for the same reason the New York Times did: while the Insider Edition (as we called it) made money for the paper, the number of subscribers who were opting to pay for that content wasn’t growing, or at least wasn’t growing quickly enough to make it a very attractive business. Eventually, I think, senior editors decided that we would be a lot better off opening the doors and allowing people to link to our pay-walled content.

I haven’t seen recent numbers, but within a few months of the NYT dropping its wall, traffic to the site appeared to have surged. Whether the Times has been able to monetize all of that new traffic — and thus make up for the lack of a pay wall — is something I don’t know. But at least now they have a chance to grow that instead of managing what had become a slow or no-growth business, and so do we (the Globe continues to have a subscription product online, now known as Globe Plus, which includes the finance site GlobeInvestorGold and an “e-Edition” of the paper; access to the archives will also still cost a fee).

It’s interesting to look at some of the more than 180 comments that have been posted on the story since it went up first thing this morning: while most are of the “thank God you finally saw the light” variety, there are some who are less than enthused. One commenter says:

“I’ve long since found online alternatives to the Globe’s old ‘insider’ features. You can’t shut us out for a few years and then expect us to come back just because it’s free. You’re not the only game in town, and you’re going to have to offer us something genuinely new and original to get us to come back on a regular basis.”

Some commenters wish that we would go even further.

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There’s no question that the Glam Media story is an appealing one: the company says that it has more than 65 million unique visitors across its network — although as Mike Arrington has pointed out in the past, that figure is an aggregation of all the visitors who come to any of Glam’s partner sites. He also noted in that post that Glam owns a bunch of pure SEO plays such as free-beauty-tips.com and so on. In a previous VentureBeat story, one critic called Glam “Boo 2.0,” referring to the Bubble 1.0 shopping site — and Matt Marshall noted that half of Glam’s total pageviews came from a single site (MyYearbook.com).

Still, the network has grown at a fairly impressive rate, and counts some prominent sites like E Online as partners — and has just launched a fairly sophisticated video content/advertising system as well. According to PaidContent, the company gets a whopping $50 CPM on some of its video ads. But to turn down a $1.3-billion takeover offer? Either Glam’s financial backers have gotten greedy, or someone has been drinking an awful lot of Web 2.0 Kool-Aid.

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The lawsuit was filed in 2006, and Google lost the case in Belgium — as well as a subsequent appeal — and had to remove links to Belgian newspaper content from its Google News index. At some point after that, it seemed as though the geniuses at Copiepresse realized how their “victory” was anything but, and talks between Google and the agency aimed at a settlement of some kind took place for awhile. Those talks have apparently fallen through and the group is now pressing forward with its suit, like someone who is determined to saw through the tree branch that they happen to be sitting on.

I know that some people are probably going to start arguing with me in the comments, so before you do, I encourage you to read up about the case — including some of my previous posts on the topic. As far as I can tell, Google’s use of excerpts from news stories meets (or should meet) every test of “fair use” imaginable — except perhaps in Belgium — especially since the company makes no money from advertising on Google News pages. On top of all that, linking enhances the value of newspaper content by exposing it to a broader audience. Belgium’s newspapers should be thanking Google, not suing it.

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It will be interesting to see what kinds of mashups programmers will be able to come up with using maps, or images, or other services. It reminds me of the experiments that the Washington Post conducted a few years ago as part of a project called Mashington Post (a great name) or what became known as Post Remix. That was mostly aimed at different interfaces to the news, including a tag cloud, but it was still pretty cool — but just as it got going the paper seemed to lose interest and as far as I can tell none of the ideas went anywhere.

Part of me is also eager to see whether the Times can stick to its guns once the data free-for-all begins, or whether it will try to clamp down on what can be done with its API.

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Although Conde Nast is mostly known for print magazines, it has been making inroads into digital publishing, including the purchase of Wired (for about $25-million) last year, as well as the acquisition of Digg competitor Reddit. Conde also owns Epicurious.com and the recently-launched online magazine Portfolio, and has other online assets including Style.com and Brides.com. Conde Nast is a unit of Advance Publications, a private company controlled by the Newhouse family that also owns a number of local business journals and U.S. newspapers.

According to FM Publishing’s page on Ars Technica, the site gets about 19 million page views a month (TechCrunch says the site gets 4.5 million uniques a month, according to a source). With a CPM fee of about $36 per ad, that means the site could make as much as $2-million a month in advertising revenue — and it apparently has just eight employees, including co-founders Ken “Caesar” Fisher and Jon “Hannibal” Stokes, who started the site in 1998.

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This isn’t the first time that Ars has had such allegations leveled at it. As Cynthia Brumfield writes at IPDemocracy, an incident involving a link to one of her posts occurred back in 2006 and has even made it into the Wikipedia entry on Ars. In the comments on her latest post, Ars writer Nate Anderson takes issue with Cynthia’s characterization of events, however, saying it was a mistake that was corrected quickly and that she should have tried to contact someone at Ars before she flamed them in a post. In a response, Cynthia said that she had heard from many others who had had similar experiences.

In the interest of balance, I emailed Ars founder Ken Fisher to ask him for a comment on the allegations, and he said that in the case of IPDemocracy, it was a simple mistake in which “the link got removed accidentally in the editing phase,” that it was fixed as quickly as possible and that there was “no intent to deceive.” As for MG Siegler’s post, he said that Siegler wasn’t the only blog to make the comparison between the iPhone and the game of Risk (this blog also did) and that therefore he didn’t deserve a link. In any case, he said, Ars didn’t see Siegler’s post and wrote its own version at about the same time (the site said it was published later because editors were busy).

I emailed MG Siegler for a comment as well, and he said effectively the same thing as Fisher: that he didn’t link to the other blog with a similar post because he never saw it. However, he maintained that Ars must have seen his post and waited a few days before copying it, and said that the site has done similar things in the past. Since his post was published, he said that he gotten what he called “tons of emails” from other bloggers and writers who felt their work had been copied, and on his blog he said that “A LOT of… well respected and well placed people working in the industry out there have the exact same thoughts.”

This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has come up, obviously. Louis Gray wrote a post about how Mashable was “stealing the B-list buzz” by not providing proper attribution to him (Pete Cashmore and other Mashable writers commented on the post), and later posted a follow-up here. In the past, Mashable put a small “via” link at the bottom of a post, without any other link or attribution (as Adam Ostrow notes in a comment, that policy has changed since Louis’s post). I don’t know what the best approach is, but I know that it’s becoming more of an issue, and it’s something that every blogger should be thinking about when they write. I wrote about this before after Louis posted his thoughts.

As I said in that earlier post, I think the bottom line is that you should link as much as possible — links are the life-blood of the web, and they are how people find new sources of information. In some cases, I will go back and link to other blogs that have written about something I posted on long after I wrote the post. I think that’s part of what blogs (and the media in general) are supposed to be about. It’s more than just Digg submissions and Techmeme headlines.

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In any disaster, one of the first things that people look for — not just journalists, but readers too — is the eyewitness account, the first-person description, the man on the scene. Whenever something like the earthquake happens, thousands of editors and producers at newspapers, radio programs and TV networks clog the phones trying to reach someone, anyone, who can provide a personal account: they call homes, schools, stores, friends, distant relatives. What was it like? Where were you when it happened? What happened next?

Twitter is able to supply all of those things — and it’s also self-directed. People can post messages about whatever they wish, rather than answering only the questions that a producer asks them. In the study I wrote about recently that looked at Twitter and Facebook and Wikipedia as disaster reporting tools, one of the comments about the California fires was that the media focused on celebrities and how they were affected, but Twitter and other sources gave a more complete version of events and how they were affecting everyone.

Obviously, 140-character messages don’t take the place of reported stories that check facts and determine what exactly happened, or pull together various reports into a coherent whole. But they are a compelling part of that story — and journalists who know how to take advantage can produce something much more complete with the help of all those Twitter reporters in the field. Journalism has been called “the first draft of history,” — and now the people putting together that draft have even more help in getting it right the first time.

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“In 2002, 86 percent of the revenue from I.D.G.’s publications came from print and 14 percent online. These days, 52 percent of the revenue is from online ads, while 48 percent is from the print side.”

That’s a remarkable shift. In some cases, magazines continue to be printed but come together primarily online, and in other cases — such as InfoWorld — the print magazine has been closed completely and the publication is solely online. And the business is better:

“Today, I.D.G. says, the InfoWorld Web site is generating ad revenue of $1.6 million a month with operating profit margins of 37 percent. A year earlier, when it had both print and online versions, InfoWorld had a slight operating loss on monthly revenue of $1.5 million.”

There is a dark lining to the silver cloud, however — the story says that IDG’s staff levels are 50-per-cent below where they were when the transformation started:

“By then, the editorial staff was down to its current level of 17 people, about half the number in 2002, and way below the peak of nearly 100 during the technology spending boom of the late 1990s.”

Still, a fascinating tale of one publisher that took the bull by the horns and made the change deliberately. As former editor Stewart Alsop says near the end of the piece: “What’s happening at I.D.G. is a fairly accurate map for every other publishing organization. Get over it, it’s going to happen.”

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