Danny Sullivan is getting a lot of points for his post beating up on News Corp. titled If Newspapers Were Stores, Would Visitors Be “Worthless” Then?

Far be it from me to defend Rupert Murdoch.

But I have to take issue with the premise that newspaper executives are idiots for not realizing the immense value of random visitors from random places who stumble across a newspaper story.

It ain't there.

As so often is the case, Sullivan uses an analogy, then takes it to absurdity:

At the store, the news exec owner greets visitors by asking them what the hell they want. Perplexed, they visitors say they heard about these stories and wanted to know more. The exec shouts at them. “Get the hell out of my store, you freeloader! This is for members-only. We don’t need riff-raff like you in here.”

This is bullshit, of course. Nobody's doing that, not even Rupert Murdoch, whose bellowing is nothing more than a negotiating ploy to try to squeeze some cash out of Google, which -- thanks to zillions of website owners signing up for its opaque AdSense deals -- has more cash than it knows what to do with.

Website users are not fungible. Some of them are very valuable. Some of them are worse than worthless, consuming resources or otherwise making a nuisance of themselves beyond reason. If there is a magic to operating a successful website, it's in figuring out how to identify the valuable ones and harvest that value, while not wasting time, energy or other resources on the others.

To use the storefront analogy: When I have people in line to buy big-ticket merchandise, I'm not going to shut down the cash register line so I can provide personal assistance to the guy who's agonizing over whether to buy a 50-cent postcard.

And the "Lookie Lous" who are shopping but not buying? So long as they don't get in the way of the real customers, or start knocking the china off the shelves, they're not really a problem. But I'm not going to go out of my way to serve them on the off chance they might accidentally drop a quarter on the floor.

A more appropriate analogy -- and one more easily understood by journalists -- might be that of a bar. If you're sitting in a bar warming a seat but not consuming anything, are you a customer? If you're eating the free peanuts but not drinking, are you a customer? Not all visitors are customers.

Once upon a time, I blocked Google from being able to index (or even access) Associated Press stories from our local newspapers' websites. It was not a stupid thing to do, not at all.

Here's why. At that time, we were not participating in any national ad networks. Every pageview delivered to anyone outside a newspaper's geographic market was a net loss in two ways: One, it consumed some server resources (not a huge deal, but servers do have costs). Two, when the ad server delivered a local ad to an out-of-market user, it reduced the effectiveness of that advertising campaign in measurable clickthrough per thousand pageviews.

Now, some things have changed. We're participating in national networks. We can serve nonlocal ads to nonlocal Lookie Lous. We can -- and do -- sell and deliver behaviorally and demographically targeted advertising, and provide anonymous targeting data to national networks. So we don't block Google, and in fact we're working aggressively to optimize our sites for searchability.

But don't try to tell me that there's significant money in random visits by random people from Elbonia. There's no there there.

One of the chronic problems that crop up whenever people write about newspapers is a failure to understand the nature and scale of the business. This isn't unique to people outside the news business; few journalists have any real grasp of the business underpinnings of their employers.

When the Star Tribune sold for around a billion dollars in 1998, it wasn't a statement about the value of newspapers. It was a statement about the value of a king-of-the-hill position in the advertising market of a top-15 U.S. metropolitan area.

That newspaper's value has plummeted, of course, as it has suffered from a brutal combination of economic recession, higher costs and an explosion of competition that's knocked it from its position of dominance.

And it may be that no one can "control" the hill in 1998 terms any more.

But the hill is still immensely valuable, and those who criticize newspapers for choosing to focus on the local advertising business are generally ignorant of the amounts of money involved.

Keeping your eye on the real value is the right thing to do. Don't be distracted by Lookie Lou.

This morning I ran across a note at drupal.org from a beginning designer asking for a critique of his attempt to design a news site. The attempt led me to focus on some weaknesses that are common to many professionally designed sites.

There are too many "redesigns" of news sites, and the typical redesign process is set up for failure. It goes like this:

A new entity takes over the site. Maybe there's a restructuring that places the site under the control of the newspaper editor. Maybe it's a change in new-media directors. Maybe it's a designer. The goal of "make this work for the user" is inadvertently eclipsed by "put my mark on my territory." That's the wrong reason to begin with. You are at high risk of replacing one set of design errors with another, and needlessly pissing off your users in the process.

A committee is formed. You always need to pull all the stakeholders into any design process, but you have to have a more clear structure than is provided by a committee in which everyone has a different idea of how decisions are going to be made. You need to be absolutely clear about who plays what role: Sponsor, Facilitator, Contributor, Designer, Builder, Passenger, and most especially, Decisionmaker. Some people may play more than one role. Lack of clarity about roles, responsibilities and process sets you up for failure.

The wrong skillsets are put into play. Designing a news website requires a deep understanding of the content that is being displayed. If you're not a hands-on production editor, you may not realize that the proposed design is ultimately unsustainable because the available content won't support it. And design committees tend to contain many opinionated executives who want to argue about fonts and color, and no actual line editors. Keep in mind, too, that art and illustration are not design, and that someone who's good at building mockups with Photoshop may not necessarily be any good at information architecture or envisioning the interactive experience or delivering a usable system.

Somebody has to build this, and the real world needs to be considered before you get carried away. If your design process isn't informed by a full understanding of the CMS you're using, you may conjure up something that costs you far more to implement than it's worth. Real design is a process of compromise. Don't get surprised by that at the wrong stage in the process.

In many redesigns, the unstructured and underskilled committee engages in a painfully drawn-out process that leads to round after round of debate and argument about personal preferences, color choices, font sizes, etc., while underneath it all there's a process of jockeying for political advantage in the newsroom. All of this happens around a consideration of just one page -- the home page, the Web's equivalent of the holy Front Page, the focus of all power and glory in any newsroom.

Eventually the exhausted combatants grudgingly agree on a "design" and slink back to their offices and leave the field of battle to the builders.

But the job isn't done! In fact, it's not even begun. You haven't really built a news site design; you've just modeled one display page.

When you build a news site, you have, at a minimum, three radically different types of displays to design:

1. The home page, which focuses on recommendation and navigation. Depending on your information architecture, you may need several similar section pages.
2. Simple list pages, which display collections of similar things and allow the user to burrow down and make choices. The "river of news" or "headline/teaser" view that Drupal provides at /node and /blog is an example of such a page. These pages have a different mission than the home page and section fronts, and the designs should reflect that.
3. Story pages, which present a single story and all of its assets, but also entice a reader to explore contextually related resources on the site (or elsewhere on the Internet). Many designers fail to recognize that a story page is every bit as important as the other two primary types, and as the proportion of traffic coming from search engines and links continues to grow, the importance of designing a great story page begins to eclipse the rest of the project.

These are just the beginning, of course. The system we put in place last year at the Florida Times-Union has more than 30 content types.

When you design pages, keep in mind that you also are designing a site, which means that you need to make it clear how pages hang together into a coherent whole.

The primary tools for creating a sense of hierarchy are not limited to the taxonomy or menu system and breadcrumb trails; you also need to consider the choices you make in font sizes and other graphical elements and how those choices suggest a membership in a broader collection of information.

Take a good look at http://www.nytimes.com/ beyond the homepage. Study how each page type uses a template that helps reinforce its position in a larger sense of order, as well as how the choice and arrangement of typographical elements within a page conveys a sense of order within the pageview.

Writing for the Washington Post, Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols advocate a renewed government effort to support journalism.

This has sparked a predictable round of mild paranoia (government support can become government control).

But it might be useful to take a look at the many ways in which government already contributes to journalism, through funding and policy, in ways that benefit the citizenry of the United States.

The big obvious examples are broadcasting.

Public broadcasting, US-style: The federal government funds about one out of every eight dollars spent on public TV and public radio through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. About twice that support comes from state and even local governments (example: Atlanta Public Schools).

Public broadcasting, global-style: The US government directly funds Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. (I've never been to VOA, but I've visited RFE/RL, and I can tell you the people who work there are militant about being journalists and not propagandists. Too bad we can't say the same about some of our domestic commercial broadcasters.) In addition, foreign governments fund huge broadcasting operations such as the BBC, Deutsche Welle, Radio Canada, RFI/France24, and so on. Some programming from these foreign services winds up on American broadcast channels.

But print, too, is subsidized, less directly.

Preferential postal rates: Since the earliest days of the Post Office, newspapers have been the beneficiaries of special treatment intended to encourage their publication and circulation. The definition of a newspaper is entangled with assumptions of a business model; there's a limit on the average percentage of advertising in the product, and a requirement of paid circulation. Mailed circulation is no longer a major factor in American daily journalism, but it's still important to many weeklies, especially in rural areas.

Legal notice publication requirements: These serve the public by enforcing disclosure of certain information such as tax assessments. In most states these are published at a statutory rate that can provide major windfall revenue for small newspapers. In some cases, "official newspaper" status has evolved into a political favor, with tax money channeled into tiny "legal publications" circulated among bankers and lawyers. In an Internet era, you might wonder whether the public purpose of disclosure could better be met through the Web.

There are other policy implementations that you might also argue are broken, but their original intent was to promote a diversity of editorial and journalistic voices.

Cross-ownership restrictions: This one is fairly recent. Since 1975, the FCC has prohibited common ownership of a daily newspaper and a broadcast outlet in the same market. Over 40 existing cross-ownerships were "grandfathered" when the rule was implemented; many still exist. The intent was to prevent consolidation from turning local markets into real monopolies.

Newspaper Preservation Act: In 1970, Congress formally exempted newspapers from antitrust restrictions, allowing them to combine their business operations while maintaining separate news-editorial staffs. The tragic flaw is that the law doesn't require the joint agencies to actually publish two newspapers, and most have ended in a paper being killed anyway.

Some less obvious sources of government support of journalism:

Journalism education: In the United States, journalism organizations benefit tremendously from a stream of employees who are trained at state expense, not at the employer's expense. It's easy to overlook this benefit and it should be noted that this is not universally the case around the world.

Newsrack locations: If you went around chaining vending machines to lampposts, you could expect them to be removed and junked rather quickly in most cities. However, publications are allowed to set up newsracks just about everywhere with fairly little regulation and generally without having to pay rent.

Preferential treatment: For years, news organizations have enjoyed preferential access to newsmakers, office space for press rooms in government buildings, etc.

Many of these policies are built around assumptions that are no longer true in an era when anyone can set up shop as a journalist with no more investment than a laptop and a cup of coffee at Starbuck's. It's not unreasonable to ask what policies we should have going forward, although we need to be very careful about the answers to that question.