Ted,

Many the things blogs do best are not what newsrooms do best. Many of the best blogs exist in the layer of commentary above the “hard news” layer (which, is actually one level removed from the primary sources of direct quotes, reports, and other documents). In this structure, stories link to documents on lower levels as a means to build descriptive structures and arguments. Hard news is the basis for the conversation around the water-cooler, but it isn’t actually the conversation. Now the Internet allows people who are experts on specific topics to talk to their peers in their field. The layer up is where the meat of the conversation happens, and newspapers are rapidly losing their grip on that sector of the “societal news conversation”. They try with opinion pages, and the commentary that appears in the columns is indeed an important leg of the overall conversation, but they can only publish once a day. They’re slow and losing eyes to the blogs that can move at 20 quick posts a day (See The Daily Dish). If newspapers want to survive, they need to enter the conversation, not cut themselves off from it by curtailing free speech.

Distributed expertise is the blogging model. The Internet gives you access to a field of experts so broad and deep, it is unmatchable by any media organization in history. (The problem is, so few of them can dedicate a meaningful number of hours a week to the project.) The blogging model is different from the newspaper model, but that doesn’t make it less valuable. Both are essential. And in order to have the best coverage at all levels (which you have argued is essential to society), this linking process should be

Newspapers will not succeed in Shultz/Marburger plan to squeeze cash out of whatever “aggregators” couldn’t mount a successful fair use defense. These cases would get expensive for newspapers real quick. No law is going to pass that won’t allow claims to be challenged, and those just cost money for everybody (enriching lawyers at the expense of the “news conversation,” isn’t it?)

An aside with some personal statistics: My Google (blog) Reader has over 350 subscriptions to sources for posts or articles that are relevant to my interests. Many of them are quite specific and knowledgeable. About 15 are for articles that also appear in print. My town has 2 newspapers, and about 10-20% of what appears in them is relevant to me.