Two friends called, within minutes of each other, each reporting the same thing. Here's the way the conversations with both of them went, roughly:

"It's happening".

"What"?

"They're getting it".

"Getting what"?

"Getting the Web. Blogs. Podcasting. Citizen power. DIY. Open source. The demand side supplying itself. All that Cluetrain junk you've been talking about for ten years."

"Who are 'they'"?

"The big media. Newspapers. TV networks. I don't know what happened, but a bit got flipped in a bunch of them. They're seeing the light".

I asked for names, and was given a pile of them. "But don't talk about it yet. None of then want the others to know".

"So what are they going to do about it"?

"They're not sure, but they want to do something. Anything. Just not what they've been doing for the last fifty years or whatever".

"Will they open their archives"?

"A lot of them will. A few of them still won't. Darwin will show us the difference".

"Will they start syndicating?"

"Of course".

For a sense of how fast this is happening, let's rewind history a little bit, to April 3, 2003, when the Register published "Anti-war slogan coined, repurposed and Googlewashed… in 42 days", by Andrew Orlowski. According to Andrew, Jim Moore's essay, "The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head", was "Googlewashed" by bloggers, giving it top result status in searches for "second superpower". The proper top result, Andrew claimed, was "a front page news analysis in the New York Times bylined by Patrick Tyler, which described the global anti-war protests as the emergence of "the second superpower".

Andrew explained,

Google is being "gamed" - and the language perverted - by what in statistical terms in an extremely small fraction indeed. That was enough to make a "meaning" disappear.

After Andrew blamed bloggers and Google for "washing" Tyler of rightful honors as progenitor of the Second Superpower idea, I coined the term "printwash" (note: there are two posts on the subject at that link) for what happens when newspapers scroll archives behind a costwall, where Google can't see them and readers can't read them without paying $2.95 (give or take) per item. The New York Times does that to everything older than seven days, with the exception (by an agreement worked out by Dave Winer) of links from Userland blogs (or links that get converted by the clever hack at this page here: http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink).

I concluded,

The "googlewashing" Orlowski talks about was done by the New York Times, not by Google, and not by bloggers.

Try finding Patrick Tyler on Google. Try looking up "Patrick Tyler" New York Times. Try looking up "Patrick Tyler" second superpower.

You won't find a single one of Tyler's stories, in their original form, in a New York Times archive site. In other words, Tyler's presence on the Web is all one degree removed from the New York Times. As for his Second Superpower story, it takes a distant back seat to Orlowski's Googlewash tar-job on Moore, Google and blogs.

Okay, now consider your local library. Look at the periodicals section, the periodicals stacks, all those nearly unsearchable microfiches, and all those Readers Guides to Periodical Literature. You're looking at a system that deeply respects not only the printed word, but the requirement that everything be both sourced, and find-able.

On the whole, blogs are highly compliant with the ethics of the periodicals section, the ethics of the stacks, the ethics of sourcing and archiving, the ethics of giving credit where due.

The bottom line: In the age of the Web, the practice of charging for access to digital archives is a colossal anachronism. It's time for The New York Times and the other papers to step forward, join the real world and correct the problem. Expose the archives. Give them permanent URLs. Let in the bots. Let their writers, and their reputations, accept the credit they are constantly given and truly deserve.

In other words, stop the printwash.

Today Google finds 31,400 results for "second superpower". The top result is still Jim Moore's essay. The second result is Andrew Orlowski's Googlewash piece. The third is Wikipedia's, which tells the story of the phrase, including the ruckus raised by Andrew. There's no mention of "printwash" (yet) at Wikipedia, although due credit is given to Joi Ito's Emergent Democracy essay (which Andrew also attacked) and Kevin Marks' rebuttal, which contained a link to the Tyler piece, and the interesting observation that Tyler did not use the phrase "second superpower".

Now reel forward to the last couple weeks, and three posts that revisit the same topic: Dan Gillmor's "Newspapers: Open Your Archives", Jay Rosen's "Will the Greensboro Newspaper Open Its Archive?" and Cory Doctorow's "Why do newspapers charge for yesterday's news?"

There are three answers to Cory's question.

1. They make money selling archives. Not long after the Googlewash/Printwash fracas, I was told that the Times makes $millions selling its fishwrap. Whatever the sum, I'm sure it's a fraction of the paper's overall income. Still, it's not negligible. The company will, if it exposes its archives, leave real cash on the table.
2. Intertia. Bodies in motion tend to stay in motion, and that goes for businesses as well as objects. Dan says, I would love to know how much the San Francisco Chronicle, which offers its archives at no charge (and loads search results with too many ads), get in revenue compared with the San Jose Mercury News, which charges for older articles. If the answer is "more", at might help brake the Mercury-News' inertia.
3. They see their work as "producing content" rather than writing, reporting, editing and publishing. This is a new thing. At Comdex 2002, John Perry Barlow said "I didn't start hearing about 'content' until the container business started going away". This was an unfortunate side effect of the Net's ability to transport and deliver every form of digital art. Broadcasters and publishers to cane to adopt the language of container cargo -- and to believe that they were now in the business of "content delivery" rather selling the writing, programming and other forms of art that their first sources produce and their final customers buy. (Believe me, no writer, photographer, movie-maker or graphic artist thinks their work is "producing content", even if they call it that in a business context).

It matters that speech is protected in ways transport is not. The first amendment to the U.S. Constitution protests freeom of speech, not "freedom of content distribution". Yet that very characterization -- of speech as container cargo -- allows the FCC to prohibit "indecent" broadcasts.

I've written about this before (e.g. the August 19, 2004 Suitwatch), so I'll let you digress on your own. Let's just say that, sooner or later, publishers and broadcasters will see how it's in their greater interest to conceive their work first as speech (and other forms of art), and second as "content".

Now, rather than look at how intermediaries will stay in business and thrive, let's look at the bottom-line questions, which are, of course, around money. There the biggest question isn't "How will they make money?" It's "How can they connect artists with customers?"

Markets, as I've often reported, are not just about transactions, or even conversations (which was Cluetrain's first point). They're about relationships. That means, if you're in the business of intermediating the sale of the artistic goods we still call "content", your job is facilitating relationships between artists and customers.

No company has done more to explore the questions here than Magnatune, the "open source" record company whose slogan is "We're not evil". Every Magnatune album gives customers a choice (each of these words are links):

play hifi lofi, tracks, license, buy

If you click on "buy", you get to this dialog:

How much do you want to pay?

For CDs, Magnatune gives $8 as the "recommended" price, then adds, "(50% goes directly to the artist, so please be generous)". It's significant that the price (a popout menu) provides a range that runs from $5 to $18.

Clearly, Magnatune understands that they intermediate in a marketplace where first sources and final customers value relating to each other, and where the intermediary's role is not just to make connections, but to determine prices. Also that real customers want to pay artists for the privilege of acquiring their goods.

So I've been thinking about why, all of a sudden, the Old Guard seems ready to embrace the chaotically connected marketplace we call the Net. I'm sure some of it is fear, and some of it is opportunism. But I think a lot of it has to do with the reasons artists go into business, whether they like it or not, in the first place: they have to.

And, let's face it, this is going to be fun.