It is extremely unlikely that when the guys behind Google flipped the switch to their search engine they would have ever imagined that they would today be pointed as the harbingers of the end of the physical newspaper. Today, that unheard of argument is now a stark reality, with industry leaders from the Associated Press to Rupert Murdoch now bemoaning why they ever decided it was a good idea to let Google troll their content for free.

Some of the outcry is warranted. It feels odd to work for one of the few, if only,  industries that produce content that can be acquired free of charge. And I agree that the industry has been slow to adapt to the changing economic and technological climate which has seen companies like Google as well as new ventures like the Huffington Post and NowPublic emerge as valid resources for information. Still, newspapers and news organizations provide a valuable, if not crucial, service to society and one that I hope can find away out of this mess.

The current squabbling over online media has been centred around the link to the content itself and who controls it. Needless to say, it’s a tricky debate given how it’s almost a Catch 22 – without Google or news aggregators like Digg, HuffPo, etc., newspaper websites would see their traffic slow to a trickle but without newspaper websites, there would be no aggregators.

The argument is summed up quite nicely by Scott Karp:

The more content there is on the web, the less money every content creator makes, and the more money Google makes by taking a piece of that transaction.

The genius behind Google is that it makes money by itemizing everything online, regardless of what it may be. Books, news articles, blog posts, images, etc. It can deftly runaround the argument that it is infringing on copyrights by putting its hands up and declaring that it only wants to sell ads and will never, ever, host intellectual property (unless there’s a formal contract involved).

The problem is that Google does its job almost too well. By collecting every bit of information from every resource it can spider through, the available market it creates has been diluted so much that it’s becomes uneconomic. With so many fish in the sea and food for only a mere fraction, it’s no surprise that outlets such as the Seattle Times-Intelligence and the Rocky Mountain News have shut their doors.

Nick Carr argues that this oversupply issue can only be solved by further consolidation. From an economic standpoint, this makes sense but I feel realistically, this is a non-starter. Forcing the industry – one that I’d like to again point out serves a very important function in society – to create scarcity by removing excess organizations will spell the end of quality, informative and investigative journalism. I do not subscribe to the belief that so-called “citizen journalism” and the blogs they originate from are the saviours of this industry. Even if the nascent ideas like Spot.Us and the HuffPo’s investigative unit yield promising results, I don’t think we can suddenly assume that they can replace dogged, experienced reporting. While I think such efforts are valid, earnest and definite step in the right direction, I think ultimately they will serve as tools for the new generation of journalists in how to write a news story that contains as much information as possible while informing their readers in a clear, concise way.

I don’t pretend to have any answers to how to fix the media industry. I’m fairly young and I’m tightly crossing my fingers I’ll be able to weather this storm and have a career that some of my colleagues have had. And while I hope that the industry emerges with some answers, like Mathew Ingram, I believe the industry has to keep innovating (and by its nature, failing) if they want to keep up and survive. But I also believe that it will take a new physical medium that brings together mobility, information, speed and technology (call it a new iPhone or a Kindle, if you must) and slap a price tag that makes it affordable for 99% of the world, Until something like that happens will we see an end to the many Chicken Little media articles  that I happen to read every day.