David Akerley is an Internet infomediary. And an auto mechanic.

His website, Cyber Paperboy, is run out of a corner of his automobile repair shop in Clawson, Mich.

A dozen times a day, between brake jobs, Akerley washes the grease off his hands and updates his site, linking to the latest news stories and photos he gleans from a long list of bookmarks and Internet information sources.

He has had no training as a journalist. He does no real reporting or writing. "I’m not a good speller," he confides. He just updates his links. Constantly. Obsessively.

"I guess I’m an Internet junkie," he says, somewhat sheepishly. "And I’m a news junkie. And so I’ve become the Cyber Paperboy."

Akerley doesn't make any money off the site. The return on the few ads he runs basically pays the monthly access fees charged by the web hosting firm that houses his site. But Akerley still gets 25,000 visitors every month, more than a quarter million every year. That’s more than many newspapers have subscribers.

I always show Akerley’s website when I train journalists about the Internet because it is a perfect example of what deep-thinking new media types call "re-intermediation."

To understand "re-intermediation" you first have to understand "disintermediation." Disintermediation is a term used to describe the disintegration or extinction of the importance of middlemen in the trading chain.

Applied to the Internet and our craft, that means. . . you.

Before the Internet, we were the sole gatekeepers. We had information power because we had the fastest access to the most information. Remember all those teletypes pounding away in their sound-insulated boxes in the back of a newsroom?

The average consumer could not afford such a direct hookup to the Associated Press or United Press International so they were dependent on newspapers and broadcast stations.

The Internet has changed that. Now, the majority of the information we used to receive, process, and disseminate is immediately available to anyone with access to the web.

David Akerley, owner of DJ's Strut & Brake Shop and webmaster of Cyber Paperboy, routinely beats MSNBC, CNN, and, of course, his local news outlets by linking to stories and information that he finds on the Net.

What David is, say the people who make up such buzzwords, is an "infomediary."

He has engaged in the process of "re-intermediation" by sorting through the huge amount of data being accessed and posted on the Internet as a result of "disintermediation."

But David’s site is small potatoes.

Matt Drudge started the whole thing. And while he is an embarrassment to most journalists, his Drudge Report is nevertheless on many of our bookmark lists. Drudge casts a major footprint in journalism because so many people turn to his site.

Why? What does Drudge do that makes his site so popular and, by virtue of that popularity, so influential?

He re-intermediates. Drudge reports what other reporters are reporting. He may put his own sensationalistic and gossipy spin on it, but Drudge’s main draw is that he makes it easy to get information.

And now, the really smart people have taken notice: people who see money in re-intermediation.

Have you seen the NewsHub or iSyndicate? These are just two examples of big time "re-intermediaries." The sites are virtual content merchants. They aggregate news and information.

iSyndicate has developed technology that automatically grabs information from more than 500 online sources. It does not steal the stories. It just offers up summaries and direct links to them. More than 141,000 websites "subscribe" to iSyndicate feeds.

NewsHub does pretty much the same thing, sending its powerful "spider" software out to grab the links and update its feeds every 15 minutes.

FOR THOSE OF US WHO SLOG AWAY reporting the news, all these megatrends in information dissemination and disintermediation and re-intermediation seem cosmic and way out.

In truth, they have already changed everything.

In the U.S., conservative estimates place the number of people who regularly use the Net at 120 million. The Internet is mass medium.

And it is the stories we write for our newspapers and broadcast stations that are posted on our own online websites that are being "spidered" and "aggregated" and redistributed by the content "re-intermediaries."

The content collectors don’t steal our stories. They just link to them.

On the positive side, that means we get a much wider audience than before. A few months back, I did a newspaper column on how people can evaluate the fake versus the real in cyberspace. I was flabbergasted by the response I got, e-mail from people who read the story across the globe.

I couldn’t figure out why so many people were sending me their examples or offering their suggestions in solving the problem, people far removed from my newspaper’s circulation area. But then someone sent along a link. My column had been "re-intermediated" by one of the content collectors, NewsLINX.

There’s a major challenge we all now face as a result of this trend.

The people who consume our product -- news -- are not nearly as dependent on us, our newspapers, or our stations as they once were.

The Matt Drudges, Cyber Paperboy’s, the NewsHubs, and iSyndicates are becoming huge competitors. And most of us had no idea.

We can’t hide from the Internet. We can no longer use websites as a "presence," or supplement to our main product. We need to be as aggressive, innovative, and immediate in updating our websites as those who troll the Net and grab content.

We want readers to come to us, not to the infomediaries. And that means to our websites.

We do have a slight advantage in name recognition. Our newspapers and broadcast stations are familiar to those who use their mouse to click for news. So, for a while, that brand recognition should translate to our online sites. But only if those sites are compelling. The world runs now on Internet speed. Everything is connected. Now, the public really can have news on demand.

The public’s appetite is ravenous.

Whatever advantages our old media ways may still have are fading by the day as the Internet becomes increasingly pervasive and imaginative. Within 10 years, almost everyone who seriously studies this predicts that many Internet sites will be as influential as our traditional newspapers and broadcast outlets. I think five years is more accurate, as broadband and fast access and web-connected cars and wireless, digital Internet phones explode on the scene.

We live in an online world.

We have to report that way. Now.

That means stories with more perspective. More balance. More links to background information. More audio and video clips and news photos. That means we can’t be afraid to scoop our 11 p.m. over-the-air newscast or our newspaper’s early morning edition by sitting on a big story. . . when Net surfers can already find it on the web.

Just remember, next time something big happens somewhere, chances are David Akerley and the Cyber Paperboy are all over it.