Newspapers Or Printed Versions of Blogs?

I came across the below article in The Economic Times yesterday which merely reproduces content from the famous tech blog TechCrunch. As readers would be aware, TechCrunch is absolutely free and does not even require its readers to register. 

In my recent blog posts (read them here and here), I’d felt that micropayments could at best be the enabler of the newspaper and magazine industry provided they offered content that people would want or need to pay for in the first place. Well, if newspapers become no more than printed versions of blogs, I think saving them entirely goes beyond the purview of micropayments.

Had this article appeared in some resource-starved small town newspaper, it would have been another thing. But it features in a leading publication like The Economic Times, which claims to be the world’s second largest business newspaper behind The Wall Street Journal. This surely suggests that newspapers are losing the only edge they have over online media, which is their ability to use their large team of on-the-ground reporters to print richer and more original stories.