Mark Cuban Is a Big Fat Idiot--News Will Stay Free

I actually like Mark Cuban. In my experience almost nobody else does -- they find him to be bumptious and arrogant and to have gotten rich by an unfair fluke (he had a company called Broadcast.com, which he sold at the top of the dot.com craze to Yahoo, and which fizzled shortly thereafter). But I find Mark -- who has gone on to buy the Dallas Mavericks -- to be a man who is living the life and clearly enjoying himself.

He is also a man of snappy, attention-deficit sort of opinions (some of which, for all I know, may be wise). His opinion the other day, to which, I assume, he gave his usual amount of consideration, involved Newser.

His position in the great debate about paid news versus free news is that one of the major enemies of news-gathering organizations is Newser and other aggregators. He flatly rejects the idea that aggregators often espouse: We're doing a service to news organizations because a portion of our our readers click through to the original story. He does a bit of quick math to show that news organizations that have created the content make, in essence, nothing from aggregators. His solution is that official news sites should block aggregators -- and that this will ultimately undermine our credibility.

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