[Mark] Cuban reportedly dared newspapers to pull their papers out of Google’s search index. “Show some balls,” he said. “If you turn your neck to a vampire, they are [going to] bite. But at some point the vampires run out of people’s blood to suck.”

Cuban’s pitch …of course, ignore[s] the fact that search-driven traffic is growing at most newspapers (in contrast to direct traffic and print circulation), and that if they don’t find a way to appeal to and monetize those readers then they will be catering to an ever-shrinking number.

Cuban’s “vampires” comment is misinformed, as GigaOM points out. But the “balls” comment is something I can actually get on board with. We’ve been listening to newspaper employees whine about Google for years now and yet, the process for removing one’s site from Google search is insanely simple. Every news site could disappear from Google in the next five minutes, if they wanted to.

The fact is, newspaper executives know that the bulk of their traffic comes from Google. So they’re not actually telling Google stop stealing our content! they’re asking that Google keep giving them free traffic, but also share some of the profit (that rightfully belongs to Google). Essentially, newspapers are admitting that they weren’t clever enough to come up with Google and then arguing that because of that, Google owes them money.

This is ri-goddamn-diculous.

Newspapers are playing the part of the crazy girlfriend who gets jealous every time you strike up a conversation with another woman and then complains that you’re socially withdrawn around her friends. I wonder if somewhere down the line, Google will just get tired of dealing with the newspaper industry and do the breaking up for them.

That said, Hearst’s Skiff Reader is a pretty sleek looking device:

It bends...

...and it's super thin.

Kudos to Hearst for building something that not only looks good, but also has a couple unique qualities.

Still, I don’t see any eReader saving the newspaper industry, nor do I see the point in designing a device tailor made for an old medium. Check out the top photo—yep, that’s the print edition of the San Francisco Chronicle in its full, black-and-white glory (see more pictures in Mashable’s post). While that’s likely just due to a “we needed a stand-in for the promo art,” the question remains as to whether Hearst is building the device around existing content or if they’re planning on crafting a whole new way of content delivery to fit the device.

Google’s Living Stories project looks and functions a lot like what I was talking about back when I wrote “Keeping up with the news shouldn’t be like keeping up with ‘Lost’”—it keeps track of a news topic while still filling you in on the back story. It also, as Paul Bradshaw notes, “is built around the way people consume content online, as opposed to how they consumed it in print or broadcast. In other words, the unit of entry is the ‘topic’, not the ‘article’, ‘broadcast’ or ‘publication’”—that, I think, is key because it distinguishes itself as intended-for-the-Web content (not print/audio/video content re-purposed for the Web).

News orgs have tried things like this in the past (The New York Times topic pages, for example) and it’s nice to see Google getting into the fray with their own version.

Of course, a Google-meets-journalism story wouldn’t be complete without someone accusing Google of being big, nasty stealers. For this story, we have Dan Lyons:

I don’t believe Google really cares about fixing or saving the news business. I think Google is just sick of getting blamed for the newspaper industry’s woes. And so Google is throwing a very tiny amount of effort into a few random things so that when it gets criticized, it can say, “But look, we’re doing this thing and that thing; we’re really trying to help these newspapers find their way. We’re creating all this great technology, and we’re not even charging the publishers for it—we’re giving them all these great publishing tools, absolutely free!”

In other words: it’s all about PR.

First of all, Google didn’t get to be a multibillion-dollar business by succumbing to flaccid accusations from crotchety stewards of a near-dead industry. Second of all, any half-brained reader of Web metrics can tell you that most news sites get the bulk of their traffic from Google. Lastly, if the print industry feels so threatened by Google’s recent forays into news, they should invent something better. (I love, by the way, how Lyons goes on to accuse Google of stealing and then calls it “a monopoly.” If Google qualifies as a monopoly, that must have made the news industry some kind of super-monopoly during the last couple hundred years.)

I hope the news industry does start coming up with something(s) better, too. Google may be “famous for slapping things together quickly, putting them out into the world as ‘beta’ products, and then forgetting about them,” (Lyons, again) but that wouldn’t be the case if there were something competing with it. Competition will push Internet news—wherever it’s coming from—to much greater heights than where it sits now.

The slides from my presentation have been posted online—I know that some of the bullet points probably require more explanation than what’s given, and I will provide that in future posts, so keep an eye on the site. I’ll also have more updates to this post later with notes, etc., so come back and visit.

In the meantime, it’s Saturday night and I’m headed out to the Ballard Art Walk. Thanks again, and have a good one.

• I’ll be sitting on a panel titled “Tales from the Trenches: How to Land and Succeed in your First Newspaper Job” with three other (relatively) recent grads. I think my contributions will tend toward the “…and Succeed” portion of the heading, as I didn’t exactly have a bidding war going for my services straight out of college. Should be pretty good fodder and maybe some war stories, too.
• I’ll be giving a presentation titled “Cool Tools”—this, I’m really excited about. I’m basically going to talk about the desktop, Web and mobile apps I use to get my job done (assistant editor of New Media). I’d say about 99.9 percent of my day-to-day duties consist of some kind of Internet use, and without hyping myself up too much, I think I’ve got enough in my head that everyone in attendance will come away with something. The presentation will be very “101,” but I plan to field a lot of questions, so if you’re attending, please feel free to fire away. I’ll have a fresh post up on Monday with my presentation and a wrap of the event.

A few resources, if you want:

• You can view/download/print the agenda via Scribd.
• If you’re Tweeting from or following the event on Twitter, use the hashtag #seaj.
• If you haven’t already, you can still buy tickets.
• If you’re attending—and if you are, you’re presumably a journalist—you’ll be on Capitol Hill and you may as well check out Capitol Hill Seattle, arguably the biggest and most successful neighborhood blog in that area (no offense, cap to the hill). Besides that, it’s a damn good news source, run by a guy who you could probably learn a thing or two from.

You know, if there were more than one person presenting with me, that title would be quite the oxymoron.

I’m very excited and flattered to be presenting a talk (for the first time) at Seattle University’s Future of News conference, taking place Oct. 10. The invite was extended to me by Cynthia Mitchell, one of my former professors at Central Washington University, who also worked tirelessly to get me hired after college and I really appreciate the opportunity.

My presentation is officially titled “Cool Tools”— I’ll be talking about some of the Web tools I use in my day-to-day. I plan on keeping it really 101, but I also plan on fielding as many on-the-spot questions as possible and I’m not above on-the-spot crowdsourcing if I run into something I don’t know.

The cost of the conference is $50 if you’ve got a job, $15 if you’re in college or unemployed (Tickets).

I know $50 is a little steep for some, but I’ll be Tweeting from the conference (maybe blogging a bit, too) and I’ll post my presentation notes and a quick wrap on this site.

If you are planning on heading to the conference, please don’t be a stranger—drop me a note here or get in touch with me on Twitter or Facebook.