J-prof Kelly Toughill wrote the following in a commentary published Aug. 16 in the Toronto Star:

In Mars Attacks, the world was saved by serendipity. It turned out that the screeching sound of Slim Whitman yodelling "Indian Love Call" made the Martians' heads explode.

Perhaps traditional publishers and broadcasters should learn how to yodel. 

She's writing about Google as a media company. The NYT plowed some of this ground on Aug. 10 (as evidenced by this earlier blog posting).

Some other stuff from Toughill's commentary:

Reader interest is no longer pivotal to survival. The chilling news this summer is that ad revenues and circulation may no longer be linked. Even when newspapers increase circulation, advertising revenues may still decline – and not just because of a worsening economy. The reason is that advertisers can now reach markets directly. Guess how.

Google is a brilliant, elegant corporation. Each time it comes out with something new, hundreds of millions of people around the world sigh and say, "Gee, why didn't I think of that?" Its products solve real problems, create real opportunities and they work. In other words, the company would be a nightmare competitor in any industry, much less one in decline.

News agencies and search engines are more alike than either would like to admit. Newspapers search out (report) information (news), then filter the results for the interests of a specific demographic (search engine user) and rank them by topic and page. Think of the "hits" on a Google web search page as the "headlines" in a newspaper.

Like the Martians in Mars Attacks, Google has superior technology. Unlike the Martians, Google doesn't want to destroy anything. Google is not a predatory company.

It has a reputation as a corporation of exemplary social values, and executives at all levels of Google have proclaimed their desire to work with traditional media on new advertising models.

Google would rather make money from traditional media than replace it; unfortunately, it may not have that choice.

Google's competitors will force it to become a media company, and its customers will demand it.

Yahoo already has a news division; it hired journalist Kevin Sites two years ago to wander the globe on its behalf.

Facebook now serves many of the traditional functions of public service journalism. University of Florida students recently used Facebook to protest scholarship cuts. The cuts were scrapped within days – without a single letter to the editor.

As my 13-year-old daughter put it, "YouTube is where you find out what's happening; Facebook is how you fix it."

A small correction. Yahoo hired Sites on a one-year contract to produce a project called The Hot Zone. The overwhelming majority of content on Yahoo! News is generated elsewhere (they do have a You Witness News section for citizen contributions).

If Toughill could tell me the second biggest name-contributor (behind the now-departed Mr. Sites) producing original content for Yahoo! News, I'd be most grateful. The site index doesn't seem to indicate a Yahoo! original news content zone.

However, Toughill is right about the economic impact of the disintermediation -- which had been a topic of conversation among the online cognoscenti more than a decade ago. However, it's worth noting that if you go back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, semi-disintermediation was occurring as retailers moved to flyers and away from newspaper display advertising.

And one lesson people should always remember about this saga is that it's much better to be in the content distribution business than content creation. Newspapers are in both.

As I noted in a Sunday post about the National Enquirer, the U.S.'s premier muckraking lowbrow tabloid has seen its circulation continually shrink over the last four years. The Enquirer actually spends big on generating content (including paying sources, a topic for another time).

Google spends nothing on generating content, instead spending on helping searchers find content -- and then putting an ad in front of them as part of the process.

Its properties don't do anything that's particularly journalistic -- although it can be a conduit for journalism if someone posts such content to one of Google's distribution channels.

Google's stock price is in the stratosphere (about US$498 today). You can't give newspaper stocks away.

The market doesn't much value this whole journalism thing, does it? Scarily, the audience might not either. It doesn't say much for the longevity of the expensive content model.

Journalists can caterwaul about how people won't know stuff if journos' jobs disappear, and huff and puff about how their industry's demise will cut off content to leeches like Google News. But if people don't care about journalists' output, if watching a waterskiing squirrel on YouTube is a more valuable use of their spare time than reading about a public-policy issue that affects them as citizens, then journalists in the expensive-content-model world will simply have to accept the fact that they -- along with journalism itself -- have become redundant.