Regaining the influence of the front page

Scott Karp at Publish2 thinks he's identified one big reason why newspapers are losing influence in setting the news agenda: the guiding/filtering role once played by the front page has been surplanted by news aggregators, a game we aren't playing very well.

His argument is well worth considering.

A taste:

The answer is that Drudge, along with Google, figured out that in the web media era, when all news content is accessible by anyone, anywhere in the world, and no news brands no longer have a monopoly over news distribution, the power of influence lies in the ability to FILTER the vast sea of news.

Newspapers were once THE most important filters for news. But they gave up this role on the web, because they didn’t see that the web analogue to what they did on the front page in print was NOT taking the same content and putting it on a website front page. In fact, you could argue that this is the single biggest mistake that newspapers have made on the web.

What they failed to see is that the web analogue to the newspaper front page is LINKS to where the news IS. That’s Drudge.