Quoted: This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/The_Economic_Idiocy_of_Blocking_Social_Media_Traffic'; digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff'; ...

After all the work I've done on newspaper websites and talking with a group of newspaper publishers last week, I realize that I get asked the same questions quite often. There are some common misconceptions in the newspaper industry regarding the Web, and I'd like to take this opportunity to highlight and correct these typical mistakes.

One of the promises of the internet is to democratize access to both information and publishing. That democratization, in theory, makes voices outside of the halls of power more capable of changing the world than they would be otherwise. The jury is still out as to how real all of that is. There are lots of people and organizations giving it a try. Good deeds alone rarely pay the rent, though, and a relatively small number of people online want to watch often-depressing investigative journalism when there's so much fun to be had in other media sectors.