maybe print is a dying medium. I am convinced the quality and standards of mainstream online reporting will continue to decline. nothing we can do about it but get hit by it. the future looks increasingly absurd and desperate.

You do understand that more than half the traffic to any site is driven by links from other sites? This is in fact a major method of scoring on Google. By implementing this, you would actually punish these venues by insuring that the only eyeballs that would EVER go to a newspaper’s website are those who go directly to the site from within a browser, and you would also insure that anything over a few days old would vanish from the face of the web.

You (and the proposal’s author) seem to misunderstand that the fact people blog and link back to news drives traffic back to the site the content comes from, thus increasing hits and ad revenue.

posting links is one thing. links to material gathered by professionals, edited by professionals, and printed/posted by professionals is another. the print media business model subsidizes internet content. Copy-and-paste does not work as a business model, or something that produces good journalism for long.