The high cost of running the local-news sites has fueled a campaign by dissident investor Starboard Value LP against AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong’s strategy of investing heavily in online content.

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And Google (GOOG) shrugs and says it can’t understand what the publishing guys are complaining about it, but goes ahead and makes goodwill gestures anyway.

By my count we’re up to three such gestures in the last nine days:

• Dec 1: Google changes its “First Click Free” program, making it easier for news sites to wall off access to their premium stuff–or harder for users to game the sites, if you want to think of it that way.
• Dec. 2: Google makes it easier for publishers to delist themselves from Google News.
• Dec. 8: Google launches a “Living Stories” experiment with the New York Times (NYT) and the Washington Post (WPO), which offers a new way to sort and read the papers’ stories. If it makes sense to you, let me know.

None of the above has anything to do with the publishers’ main complaint, which is that Google is simultaneously profiting from and devaluing their product. But it does allow Google to say that it’s listening to, and even working with, publishers.

Google could appease publishers simply by cutting them bigger checks, but that’s a slippery slope the search giant is trying to avoid. And the biggest publishers could put more oomph behind their argument if they really did cut themselves off from the search giant’s index. But tellingly, none of them have actually done this to date.

So I think we’re going to be stuck here for some time.

Nope.

Check out these snapshots of Akamai’s live traffic meters, which I took shortly after 1 pm EDT. They indicate that the Web infrastructure company’s clients are serving up more than 109 million customers per minute–more than they have at any other period this year, including Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Akamai (AKAM) doesn’t represent all of the Web, but since it’s by far the biggest content delivery network service, it’s a pretty darn good proxy. The previous record appears to have been 90.6 million, set last month during the Iranian elections (click to enlarge):

UPDATE: The Akamai folks want me to note that this chart measures overall Web traffic, not just traffic to news sites, etc. Which means that there could be other factors pushing up traffic today — large software downloads, etc. And, for that matter, if you look at Akamai’s peak traffic days over the last year, you’ll note that they’ve increased nearly every month. So while we can say that Akamai’s was serving more Internet traffic at 1pm eastern time than it has at anytime in the last year, we can’t draw a straight line between that fact and the fact that Jackson event was happening at the same time. But I’m going to go ahead and draw a dotted line.

UPDATE 2: Now I see why the Akamai folks were so cautious. New stats indicate that the event was big on the Web, but not as big as the Obama inauguration.

Meanwhile, while I didn’t actually go ahead and write this, my hunch was that any Web traffic we did see today might come from countries outside the U.S. that either didn’t get a TV feed or that cared about Jackson much more than Americans did.

But Akamai’s visualization of traffic to news sites world-wide says I would have been wrong about that, too: Almost all of the traffic is being served up by American news sites, and traffic to sites around the world is down for this time of day.

But here’s the thing I still don’t get: All of this has been happening when there has been nothing to see. Here’s a representative screen grab of ABC’s live feed, which I took around 1:10 pm Eastern Time.

OK. Have at it. I’ll be back later in day with whatever other traffic tidbits I can round up.