it is my cake

I want to both have it and eat it!

a small piece of code...

... which would instruct these services to ignore the pages.

You mean like robots.txt...?

And if they still want "the attention search engines bring", why not have an un-robots.txt blocked section that has the headlines and nothing else, so people have to click on the headline and visit their site to get the article...?

Not exactly rocket science.

Dear media moguls – it's 2009 now.

Like trying to herd badgers using sloths.

This could be an own goal.

If the BBC News service becomes the only free site, people will just go there for all their news...

Blogging is the New Journalism

Blogging and Podcasting (collectively known as "PAJ" - Personal Area Journalism) are slowly but surely rendering the big production houses obsolete.

The entire News/Op-Ed industry is migrating to a freelance-type, report-as-you go content model.

The Blogger is the new "reporter," in the sense that he/she writes about what is happening around (or to) him/her.

The Aggregator is the new "Editor-In-Chief," in the sense that its search engine relevancy rankings are largely responsible for determine whose content is consumed by the Internet-at-Large.

Granted, a lot of the content out in the Blogosphere is completely vapid and useless, but some of it is extremely topical and/or very well researched.

And we are finding that in many cases in today's world, Bloggers "on the inside" can go to and/or report from places that the mainstream media houses can't (or aren't willing to) access. The current unrest in Iran is a good example of this: Even the U.S. State Department requested that Twitter postpone a systems maintenance cycle so election protest-related "Tweets" wouldn't get lost or bounced while the service was off-line...

WTF

What journalism, most papers (not newspapers) now consist of fiction and stories lifted from the web, Modern reporters now couldn't investigate a story if you wrote all the evidence and sources in 10 foot high letters on a wall in front of them. My local rag ran a totally inaccurate story about the costs to date of a planned incinerator, the Editor was most upset when I rang, contradicting every thing reported and questioning the abilities of the reporters. He asked my where I had sourced my evidence and was totally gobsmacked when I said back issues of your paper but he still failed to print a retraction.

Bring back real journalists and not media hounds and I'll start buying papers again.

Integrity for Journos

Most of these human-wannabes are initially highly motivated by justice & have some integrity during their formative years. The problem with the job is that the need for better stories is the total loss of any integrity they ever had. Give up the job & find another. No-one cares about journos except other journos. You have little to no credibility.