DISQUS

"we'd have to look at Boston.com's logs to see if they are indeed sending traffic" ... nope. The linking site does not know whether anyone clicks. Only the linked-to site would have that information.

Milk.

Years ago, when I was still at the Star Tribune, we had a company meeting at which senior managers like publisher Joel Kramer (now the guy behind Minnpost.com) and editor Tim McGuire (now at Arizona State) performed in a play. I think Chris Mahai (now Aveus.com) wrote it.

The play was called "Milk." And the theme was pretty much as you describe.

Milk comes in exactly one flavor: milk-flavored. Until somebody gets smart about market segmentation and discovers a market for chocolate milk. Or strawberry milk. Or milk delivered as ... ice cream.

The marketing problem we face isn't really about milk or ice cream or the Internet or print. It's about understanding people and their needs and their wants and their interests.

And newspapers suck at that. There's no product-development process. No marketing department (neither ad sales nor promotion constitute marketing). No R&D. This has been long recognized, and long bemoaned.

So what are we doing about it these days? Cutting.

What you're looking for is the ProxyPass directive. Examples here:

http://krijnhoetmer.nl/stuff/apache/mod_proxy/
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/support/help/MailAr... for an example of proper configuration

The other obvious candidate is Drupal, which is now powering dozens of fairly large newspaper sites.

However, the path from a generic Drupal download to a system properly configured to meet the needs of a large multimedia news organization is not a short one.

We're working toward relaunch of Jacksonville.com on the Drupal platform by the end of the month, followed quickly thereafter by CJOnline.com. As quickly as possible we'll be releasing our work -- new Drupal modules and a configuration script -- to the open-source community.

Our goal is to move from a model in which web sites are maintained by online specialists to one in which every member of the news organization can play an appropriate role in direct online publishing and interaction.

The flexibility issue is huge. One of the benefits of our system will be that editors will have complete flexibility to change layouts of major display pages such as the homepage, section fronts, and topics pages. It won't be necessary to know any HTML.

Watching geeks writhe in denial rather than take the time to understand disruptive innovation is about as entertaining as watching journalists do the same thing.

Disruptive innovations aren't "better." They're "different" and typically create new markets.

The point of Amazon's new "database" is not to replace some DBA's gloriously ACID-compliant performance-tuned data-striped stored-trigger-infested Oracle-based moneysucker.

Not any more than blogging is "intended" to replace print journalism. Or personal computers were "intended" to replace mainframes.

Disruption of existing solutions is a delayed side effect.