Do Something, Jeff Jarvis!

Trevor Butterworth, of STATS, and Damien Cave, of the Times, today have suggested that full-time media consultant (including to the dangerously ill Newhouse Newspapers) and Google enthusiast Jeff Jarvis stop complaining and start doing, on the occasion of Jarvis’ latest very angry rant about, yes, newspapers. This is Butterworth: “Enough blowing; Jarvis, come up with a business plan. You know, one of those things were money comes in to replace the money going out. The endless bloviating over who ‘blew it’ without actual solutions is beginning to sound like an oral fixation; I realize this must be very gratifying, but it’s time to fix the problem, not the blame.”

And this is Cave:

Surely this need not be the zero sum game that you, Jeff, and many others seem to harp on. We shouldn’t have to choose between Google and The Washington Post or The New York Times. It’s not a question of win or lose, one or the other — it’s a question of pricing. What I hope is that there is a willingness in both camps to make a good faith effort to understand that their interests are aligned, and that it’s time to come up with a more formal pricing model. Our bosses shouldn’t expect Google or any other aggregator to make up for their mistakes, or cover the industry’s entire shortfall — but a little give does not seem unreasonable. At the very least, the precedent of payment needs to be re-established.

This is what mature businesses do. At the startup phase, no one gets paid. Once success arrives, the checks go out. The Web just tends to push the day of reckoning — the day of figuring out how much everything is worth — down the road. Yet, this is a communication revolution, a brave new world, but just as the dot-com entrepreneurs of 1999 (who I once covered) exaggerated the Net’s power to re-write the rules — internet dog food sales, anyone? — so too are today’s blogging boosters ignoring the fact that even here, in a world of links, there are some basic business fundamentals that still apply.