Cuban Takes Machete to Papers' Sites

In the December issue of Presstime, the Newspaper Association of America asks six Interwebheads how they'd run newspaper Web sites if given the chance to start from scratch. Among the panelists are: reddit.com's co-founder Steve Huffman, topix.net's CEO Chris Tolles and Mark Cuban, who references Crocodile Dundee when answering the...

By Robert Wilonsky

December 5, 2007

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In the December issue of Presstime, the Newspaper Association of America asks six Interwebheads how they'd run newspaper Web sites if given the chance to start from scratch. Among the panelists are: reddit.com's co-founder Steve Huffman, topix.net's CEO Chris Tolles and Mark Cuban, who references Crocodile Dundee when answering the question, "With online news often described as a commodity product, where does traditional newspaper content fit?" As in:

What is defined as news has been changed to fit the Web. Allowing that to happen may have been the newspaper industry's biggest mistake. Wire service aggregation passes for comprehensive news, and papers print the same stuff. That's stupid. In addition, they are letting blogs pass as reporting. The industry has made no effort to brand its differences from online. [It] should be paraphrasing Crocodile Dundee -- "That's not news, this is news."

He has plenty more to say. I know -- surprise, right.--Robert Wilonsky

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