by Rick Edmonds Published May 7, 2009 11:07 am Updated May 9, 2011 5:21 am

It’s not a brand new thought, but hearing Google vice president Marissa Mayer say it at Sen. John Kerry’s hearing Wednesday was chilling: the “atomic unit of consumption” for news, going forward, will be the single article, not an assembled newspaper, magazine or Web Site.

And Mayer did not shy away from the corollary. If the article stands on its own as content, “it also requires a different approach to monetization; each individual article should be self-sustaining.”

Now here is the part that gets really ugly. Mayer concedes that “these types of changes will require innovation and experimentation in how news is delivered online and how advertising can support it.” Meanwhile, news organizations and reporters should feel grateful for the table scraps Google tosses its way via clicks to their sites from Google Search and Google News.

There is plenty wrong with this picture. It’s self-aggrandizing, since Google Search is the huge beneficiary of article-specific advertising. It is a formula for bankrupting the news organizations and pauperizing the reporters and editors who produce the “robust and independent journalism” to which Mayer’s testimony gave lip service.

And at a minimum, this new order of things would skew coverage to topics that have a natural advertising base (health and fitness, for example) and away from top-tier civic and investigative reporting.

I don’t think Mayer’s formulation about the atomic unit of consumption is exactly right. Even in an article-driven world a brand like The New York Times and maybe your hometown paper may confer what she calls “authority on a particular topic.”

However, thinking about whether the article now trumps the publication nicely captures the divide between old-style and new age news consumers. The oldsters not only like the crinkle of paper as they read over morning coffee, they like how the editors have assembled and ordered the news (and that goes for NPR and the nightly network news as well).

The wired-up crowd range from indifference to contempt for the assembly and selection (a.k.a. gate-keeping or “lecturing”). They enjoy putting together their own picture of what’s going on, perhaps blogging and tweeting on matters of personal interest and drawing on social networks for ideas on what is worth a look.

Mayer believes that making the article paramount has “powerful consequences” for how it is prepared. “The publisher must assume that a reader may be viewing the article on its own, independent of the rest of the publication. To make an article effective in a standalone setting requires providing sufficient context for first-time readers, while clearly calling out the latest information for those following a story over time.”

I agree with Mayer that reading an article should not be like walking in during the middle of a complicated movie, and online reading provides some good opportunities for contextualizing and deeper dives that traditional formats do not. And there is plenty of room for improvement.

On the other hand, writing stories that make sense on their own has always been good practice, certainly back to the ancient times when I was learning the craft. Making running stories easier to follow in newspapers was one of the lead findings of the Readership Institute of Northwestern’s Media Management Center in its first report in 2003.

So the craft part of Mayer’s take on news is palatable. The business model is hard to swallow, as the proud Boston Globe glimpses mortality, Tribune Co. newsrooms are gutted and experienced news professionals have more than ample reason to feel obsolete. Maybe this is Google’s information world, and the rest of us just live in it.

But Mayer’s testimony strikes me at a minimum as tactless and, at worst, an endorsement of creative destruction run amok. It smacks of the famous, if embellished, Vietnam-era saying (before Mayer’s time, to be sure), “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”