Media brands are so powerful they will keep their premium spot in the minds of readers, be it on- or offline. That’s the kind of thinking many media executives and journalists still harbor.

Reality is different. The service an online news source provides has nothing to do with that of a traditional newspaper or television and big media brands lose their appeal.

Vin Crosbie’s series on the fate of American newspapers explain that the bundle of news and entertainment that defines a traditional media brand is not replicable on the web. Once unbundled, each bit of content competes in its own vertical. That’s why it’s useless to put a regional paper’s op-ed on international politics online.

To prove my point, I’ve asked Google Insights about the queries for a few newspaper brands in their home markets. The graphs below show that web-users in need for news search less and less for their newspaper’s online presence. (Units on the vertical axis are random – they represent Google’s measure of interest.)

The graphs are not authoritative, I’d need to analyze a larger sample of brands for the results to be significant. Plus, users can remember a website’s URL or put it in their faves. But the amount of traffic brought by search engines to news websites seems to increase. Otherwise, the number one conversation topic at News Corp. wouldn’t be Google. Conclusion: users are less interested in traditional media brands.

Now, consumers have not become monomaniacal or obsessed with single-issue media. It’s just simpler to read general-interest news in a paper form.

The media consumed on the web doesn’t fulfill the same mission as offline. Newspaper websites, in their present form, must answer queries. Branding has to be rethought. Current brands have to evolve into umbrellas that guarantee the content of a page or a blog.