The angst in publishing about Facebook is completely wrong.

If it's played right by publishers, it will create flows that make their businesses grow, and I don't think it necessarily has to be the end of all independence, I don't think Facebook has to suck up the whole future of publishing.

But they don't even want to put up a fight, they just want to give up.

I saw this in a piece by Claire Cain Miller in the NYT last week.

She believes the shift has happened, and that from now on news will be on Facebook. Well, I don't think so. This is so common in tech analysis. People think that what just happened is permanent. It so rarely is, I'm tempted to say it never is.

I liken it to opening day of the baseball season. The first pitch hasn't even been thrown, and they're already saying the Yankees have won. In tech and in business, as in sport, the feeling you've already won contains the seed of your defeat. News is not a small thing. It's bigger than Facebook. News reporters are too impressed with money, and too inconsiderate of readers.

To date journalism doesn't have a place in Facebook. They hope it does. Maybe it does. But will it be the only place where journalism exists? I seriously doubt it.

I don't know why reporters and columnists at the Times have such a hard time seeing it. News is a river, not a static thing. They should never have ported their front pages, which are a vestige of a daily publishing cycle. And they should have accepted that no single news org will contain all the news any reader wants.

Because none of them would create the river, they left that to the tech industry to do. Which they did, with varying amounts of success. The thing they can't see, for some reason, is that any one of them could start the river. The tech is there to do it. Easily! What are they waiting for? I swear I cannot figure this out.

The day someone, anyone in news wants to compete, the formula is waiting for them. It's true, if they never take the field, Facebook software will eat their world. So take the field, and let's get started!