I earned an attaboy last week from a former Daily News staffer for my column about Google's feeding on daily newspapers and how it will eventually devour them. The ex-staffer, appalled by the prospect, retorted that she'd found a crack in my logic. As an aggregator of news, she argues, Google will have to get its information from somewhere — probably newspapers. But that won't be possible if newspapers are gone.

What's more, as Google decimates the dailies, not only will their newsrooms wane, so will the secondary media — television, radio and, yes, weekly newspapers — that depend upon the dailies' resources.

What Google now does to daily newspapers isn't really new; they're just better at it. Ancillary media have always ripped off the dailies. Even the best in national broadcasting use them to set their agenda.

A couple years ago, I sat in on a pitch session for NPR's premier news program, All Things Considered, where reporters lobbed story ideas at the program's executive producer.

When the executive producer walked in, she carried just three things. That's right, three newspapers: The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. And she did what I've seen news directors — from little Salisbury, Md., to big-city Philly — do every day. She scanned the daily newspapers, checking back throughout the meeting to be sure that her broadcast would cover the same ground.

Compare the stories on the front page of the Inquirer with those offered by any local broadcaster or print weekly. For some, the dailies offer a mere menu of ideas from which to cherry-pick. But for many, the daily sets the agenda, if not the standard.

And why not? With hundreds of reporters in the field, the scope of daily newspaper reporting is wider and often deeper than secondary media. And since the overwhelming majority of adults no longer read a daily, why shouldn't smaller news outlets turn first to the best reporting available?

"No one can produce the rich information that Philadelphians need," proclaims the DN ex-staffer, "better than the Daily News and the Inquirer." To be sure, no media outlet produces more news; even if a few, including this one, will often produce better.

But I don't see how good daily newspaper journalism will (in her words) "prevail," simply because Google "just can't replicate it." I'm sorry, but in my world the white hats don't necessarily win. And as dailies become unmoored, most secondary media will drift even further from serving the public interest. For as digital media replaces the daily newspaper of record, with few exceptions, news reporting will continue its slide toward advertorial. Here's why:

The former DNer ends her note with the "hope that you and your readers do not despair." But another note I got recently from a ex-newspaper editor only heightened my fear.

This editor, who once worked for City Paper, now helps to produce a new "Diet and Health" Web site for AOL. While Google delivers information based on an amalgam of its users' preferences, AOL employs old-fashioned creatures called editors.

But what AOL is doing to its editors is awful: undermining its own integrity and undercutting all journalism. More than ever, AOL is driven by advertising dollars. The more times a page is viewed, the more money it makes. As an interactive medium, it's easy for them to link specific editorial content with advertising results. "Every time you click," writes the AOL editor, "our page views go up we get more ad dollars then I get promoted."

Now, in the broadest terms this is how any medium works, from movies to magazines. More people means more revenue, and so on. But between an interactive news product that targets a narrow audience, and a printed newspaper in search of a wider one, the differences are distinctive.

Interactive writers can quickly become slaves to instant ratings; while paper journalists are buffered by the relative inefficiency of print, and protected by a long tradition of willfully ignoring a newspaper's advertising.

City Paper, for instance, wants people who'll read this entire newspaper, from front to back. But the AOL model is tightly targeted, and the context of its information is equally narrow. AOL's Diet and Health site has loads of diet resources, with charming tales of chubby girls in search of their sleek inner selves. Entertaining, certainly. But such narrowcasting better serves its advertisers because it shields its readers from a larger context. You won't learn about the politics or economics of obesity if the salaries of editors are linked to advertising dollars.

AOL's narrowcasting encourages even the most diligent reporters to become entertainers, even shills. The model of an AOL food journalist isn't Adelle Davis raking muck. It's Kirstie Allie: fat, dumb and beloved enough to earn the enthusiastic clicking of the crowd.

Thankfully, few people now read the Web like they do a newspaper. But what scares me most is when newspapers become more like the Web, the two become inextricably intertwined.