Cuban Says "Kill the Parasites" By Not Letting Them Link

Jim Romensko wakes up at 5 am every morning and heads to a cafe with his laptop. There he sifts through the news about the media business that earns him the biggest paycheck at the Poynter Institute. Today his column included a dispatch from Newsweek, in a column by Daniel Lyons.

Lyons writes about billionaire Mark Cuban’s idea of how big media can “exterminate the parasites,” the hated news aggregators who have made a lucrative business out of publishing links to old media’s on line stories.

Cuban said that money-losing newspapers and magazines should declare war on the Drudge Reports and the Huffington Posts of the world by using a piece of software that blocks incoming links from aggregators. “With a few lines of code, the old-media guys could snuff them out.”

The aggregators claim that they provide readers for the old media sites, since many people click through to the original source to read the whole story. Cuban asserts that very few readers actually do, and that having the content on the aggregators sites surrounded by ads is like giving guns to the enemy to fight a war.

But here’s the rub, as Lyons points out…this trick will only work if everyone does it. It would have to be a mass effort, every big guy doing it at one time