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I was stuck in an airport lounge Saturday morning, sitting in Lubbock, Texas, waiting for the fog to clear in Houston so I could go home. The TV was babbling away. It was CNN's airport channel. I have no idea what happened in Iraq, because CNN didn't see fit to tell me what was going on. I heard two things, repeated over and over: CNN is the most trusted name in journalism (promo, with booming voice and imposing music). And Alec Baldwin yelling at his daughter on the phone.

Alec Baldwin yelling. A story with no civic or social value, appealing only to our inner Gladys Kravitz, a story that had been on the Today show 24 hours earlier.

Then, over the weekend, came the next idiotic nonstory: Sheryl Crow and the toilet paper. One square per toilet visit! Looney-tunes liberals on the loose! But did anyone actually read her blog item? She was leg-pulling. Clear unless you're either a complete moron or work in TV "news."

24-hour television news has created a terrible vacuum into which the worst possible garbage is pulled. Celebrity trash. Shouting heads. Political demagogues masquerading as journalists. Result: Fewer people today can name the vice president, their own governor, or the president of Russia today than in 1989. And the best-informed Americans are the ones who watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Somewhere a TV news channel executive is feeling good about bumping the Nielsen numbers. He, she or it should feel ashamed about trashing the brand, not only of the channel/network, but of journalism itself.

Continuing my riff on the four keys to a great news website:

I stumbled across a great quote from the late Douglas Adams, who noted that we think everything invented before we were born is normal, everything invented before we were 30 is exciting, and everything invented after that is an offense against the natural order of things.

"This subjective view plays odd tricks on us, of course. For instance, 'interactivity' is one of those neologisms that Mr [John] Humphrys [BBC news presenter] likes to dangle between a pair of verbal tweezers, but the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport -- the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn't need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don't (yet) need a special word for people with only one head."

I admit I never thought of "interactive" as a neologism, but that explains why there's been so much confusion. For years it's galled me to see "interactive" glued onto the names of organizations utterly opposed to interactivity, as in "Daily Bugle Interactive." Newspaper associations hand out awards in "interactive" categories to websites that glue flashy bling-bling onto old-media, linear, one-way news lectures.

Americans, who pretty much owned the 20th century, are particularly affected by this temporal myopia.

Several years ago my wife and I traveled through Ireland, staying at farmhouses and country homes, eating lamb stew at country inns, and staying up late at little Irish pubs.

We have Irish pubs in America where fake Irish bands set up on low stages, turn on amplifiers, and play for us. In Ireland what I witnessed was entirely different. People wandered into the bar carrying instruments, took over a centrally located table, and just began playing, apparently for free beer. More arrived, some dropped out and circulated. It was hard to tell where band left off and audience began, as the audience might be playing along with silverware and glasses, and singing. It was participatory music.

William Gibson says the future is already here; it's just unevenly distributed. So also the past is still here, and unevenly distributed. If we just look around us we can see that the "normal" human condition just might be a bit different than we assume.

I don't know why "interactivity" is so confusing. "Inter" and "active" are pretty straightforward. "Inter" is about connection. "Active" is about doing. What do people do on your website? Does it have to do with connecting with other people?

The social isolation and disconnection that is the legacy of 20th century mass media is one of the poisons that is behind the steady decline of newspaper readership since 1970. Robert Putnam has documented this decline and has some ideas about how to counter it.

I think one thing newspapers can do is to embrace this concept of interaction. We need to become convenors of community, facilitators of civic conversation, builders of social capital. This is about the actions we take in our geographical communities, not about the technology we deploy on our websites.

It's in our social interests and in our strategic interests. The good news is that it also works in the short term: people love it, respond to it, join in it. Participative components significantly increase the frequency numbers (visits per user per month) of a news website.

The anti-MSM reaction on the net to the Belgian court ruling against Google News has been predictably hysterical and boils down to a few completely mistaken points:

• Google is a search engine. Google has become a publisher, and Google's activities as a publisher are the ones that are at issue here. Google's search system was not the issue in the Belgian ruling.
• Newspaper publishers are stupid and don't understand basics of the Internet like robots.txt. Nonsense. Everybody knows about robots.txt and about its shortcomings. The so-called robot exclusion standard (theoretically) forbids spiders from visiting pages. It can't encode licensing terms for spidered content. This is why the World Association of Newspapers is proposing a richer alternative called Automated Content Access Protocol.
• Google is sending valuable traffic to publishers, and squaring off against Google is self-destructive. This is not relevant to the question of whether Google's repurposing practices amount to fair use or thievery. But it also isn't automatically true. Publishers benefit from some sorts of Google listings and not from others. Many publishers have a business model predicated entirely on service to a geographically focused community and derive little benefit (and often great expense) from Google-driven traffic. And, of course, publishers suffer when the new summary pages of Google News take away the audience that otherwise would have gone to the publishers' content on their own sites.
• Google is good and MSM is evil. If you think that, you probably haven't read any of Google's one-sided terms-of-service documents or examined Google's collaboration with censors. Google snatches content at will and republishes it, but has this to say about your reuse: "For example, you may not use the Service to sell a product or service; use the Service to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales; take the results from the Service and reformat and display them, or use any robot, spider, other device or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service." Maybe we should just cut-and-paste that into our TOS documents.

I can't read Flemish, so I don't know what the order published on the front of Google Belgium says, but I can read the English-language summary (PDF) published at ChillingEffects.org.

It contains these words:

"Considering that the expert Mr. GOLVERS, who had as particular assignment to describe how press articles are presented and the interactivity between the visitor and the web site of Google News, concludes that 'Google News must be considered to be an information portal and not a search engine'; ...

"... as soon as the article can no longer be seen on the site of the Belgian newspaper publisher, it is possible to obtain the contents via the 'Cached' hyperlink which then goes back to the contents of the article that Google has registered in the 'cached' memory of the gigantic data base which Google keeps within its enormous number of servers; ..."

I'm not eager to see lawsuits against search engines as a primary tool for resolving this issue, but it seems to me that the Belgian ruling is well grounded in the reality of today's Internet. There is a line between fair use and thievery, and it is not Google's to define through unilateral action.

(Disclosure: I run Google ads on my site. Once in a very long while they send me a check for $100, which my wife forgets to cash.)

I'm in Reston, Va., waiting for my turn in front of the room at the American Press Institute. The seminar is "Internet strategies for community markets." Gordon Borrell is up right now and is pointing out the inherent weakness of one-note news sites, citing Pew research that says the "yesterday market" -- the people who went online yesterday seeking local news -- is 9 percent at best, while there are many other things to do online.

He's so right.

For years I've been citing four key concepts: timely, useful, interactive, entertaining. So many local news sites are none of that. You can't build success on the Internet by building an HTML version of your daily print product.

I've only been here fore a couple of hours but it seems that most of the seminar participants get that, and are eager to dig into new areas, especially participation/interaction.

Greg Stein, chairman of the Apache Foundation, says the era of packaged commercial software is coming to an end, because open-source alternatives are wiping out the market: "All of your software will be free. It means that, over time, you aren't going to be paying for software anymore but will instead pay for assistance with it."

I see a lesson for newspapers in the open-source software phenomenon. Everything that can be a commodity, will be a commodity. General news has passed that point. To understand where and how we create value, we must discard the notion that news has inherent commercial value -- it doesn't. Value comes into play when we focus on how and why people use information. What jobs are people trying to accomplish? How can we make that process work better? Opportunities are waiting to be discovered.