The anti-MSM reaction on the net to the Belgian court ruling against Google News has been predictably hysterical and boils down to a few completely mistaken points:

Awhile back a team of Rich Gordon's whiz kids from Northwestern University worked with Davenport's Quad-City Times on a combo print-online youth product called Your Mom.

Last year the paper pulled the plug on the printed product but kept the website. Now Will Sullivan notes that the Lee Enterprises newspaper has killed Your Mom online as well.

Om Malik profiles a company he calls "the American Idol of digital photography." The idea: Get photographers to compete online to get their work printed in a magazine. The site: JPG magazine.

It's human nature to compete for scarce resources. Online space isn't scarce, but print always is scarce. I wonder what use newspapers could make of this principle. Hmm.

(Here's something I posted to a mailing list. It's a tangent from discussion of low newspaper website traffic on Sundays.)

Newspaper readership has been declining steadily since 1970. Confronted with the Internet, newspapers generally have responded by creating "online newspapers," transporting a failing product model from dead trees to electrons.

We've rolled out a new design for BlufftonToday.com, visually aligning the website more effectively with the printed newspaper and fixing some usability issues that were identified in the site's first year of operation and through formal testing.

The changes include a number of new functions and features, particularly in the social networking area. User profile pages now include buddylist avatars and guestbooks.

I've been on the road a bit lately doing actual work on some projects. Upcoming I have several conferences:

New York Press Association convention. For some reason it's in Vermont. I've never been to Vermont but I hear they make good ice cream. Flying to Albany Thursday, speaking Friday, and theoretically home Friday night. We'll see.

We're always looking for easy answers to complex questions. Tom Mohr's piece in E&P strikes me as a case of that.

There is no magic bullet, and binding together the newspaper industry's generally misdirected online efforts into a single effort is unlikely to provide one. Bigger is not better.

There's no question in my mind that the newspaper industry ought to be working together constructively.