In Joel Spolsky's talk about StackOverflow, he says that one of the 9 key points is that Google is your UI. It sounds that NPR traded a few people paying for transcripts to get many more people discovering npr.org.
Okay, so lets say Google is your UI. What are you supposed to do about that? Does it matter at all? Everyone elses UI is also Google, if that's the case. So by using Google, you're actually doing yourself a disservice by going with the flow and not innovating.
Wouldn't it be awesome if StackOverflow did something better than a google search? Like, say, given a set of programming languages or similar projects, you could get a list of most commonly hit problems for you to avoid in the future. Or they could give you a sort of 20 questions of "did you try this" for certain difficult problems. Or anything else other than search. That's innovating.
Accepting your UI to be "Google" is giving up and letting your competitors pass you.
I think you're missing the point; it's not that you should innovate, it's that the majority of your users will be using google and then find your site. You can innovate all you want but if no one knows about it or uses it then it doesn't really matter.
Most websites' primary traffic source is search engines, the lion's share of which is Google. Websites that are otherwise are rare, so optimizing your pages to match what people are searching for is pretty important.
You can innovate with in-site search, and StackOverflow does, you can browse by tags, you can do string searching, you could even do interesting things with analytics regarding who browses what questions when, but if you can give people a page that corresponds to what people are looking for on Google, then that'll deliver a lot of value.
A sudden outbreak of common sense, in contrast to the current discussions among the major media conglomerates of how to monetize their online content. Not the same thing but the attitudes of NPR vs. Murdoch in particular couldn't be more different.
(U.S.) Public radio's model has always been "open" and "opt-in" (aside from the tax dollars -- which, by way of comment, I do not personally begrudge). This seems a better alignment with their overall model.
Regarding that, social cooperation seems to have been under/de-valued as a organizational model, in recent times. Maybe it's making a comeback.
Locally, public radio stations have significantly reduced the length and intrusiveness of their fund raising drives, by communicating to their audience that they are trying to achieve precisely this. It seems to be working, so far. I don't know how the contributions break down, e.g. more from pre-existing donors versus new donors.
