Media
Newspapers need to get a clue - quickly
The Paris-based World Newspaper Association, a body that appears to be almost pathologically clueless when it comes to the Internet, is blustering and grumbling about how search engines such as Google News are “stealing” their content and should be made to either stop or to pay for it. Although the group hasn’t said what it has in mind, it is muttering darkly about challenging the “exploitation of content” that its members feel is going on. In a magnanimous gesture, they admitted that search engines help drive traffic to their sites, but said this didn’t justify the fact that Google and others have built their businesses on “taking content for free.”
This issue has come up before, when a representative of the European Publishers’ Council accused Google and other Web search companies of being “parasites” living off the content of others. Gavin O’Reilly of the WNA has been quoted as saying that the Web companies are engaging in “kleptomania.” Here’s what he told the Financial Times:
Mr O’Reilly likened the initiative to the conflict between the music industry and illegal file-sharing websites and said it was not a sign that publishers had failed to create a competitive online business model of their own. “I think newspapers have developed very compelling web portals and news channels but the fact here is that we’re dealing with basic theft,” he said [snip]. Services such as Google News link to original news stories on the home pages of newspapers and magazines and display only the headline and one paragraph of the story [but] “That’s often enough” for readers browsing the top stories, Mr O’Reilly said.
I must admit that I thought the WNA was out of its mind to even bring this subject up in the first place, but the comparison to the RIAA and its war against file-sharing took the association’s case well past stupidity and into the realm of farce (ironically, as Rafat at PaidContent points out, the WNA has a great blog called Editors Weblog). How exactly is linking the headline and first paragraph of a story to a newspaper’s website the same as people downloading an entire song from a P2P application? The answer: It isn’t.
As for Mr. O’Reilly’s argument that readers are often satisfied with the headline and one paragraph, whose fault is that? Maybe the WNA should try suing every user of Google News in court, the same way the RIAA has — that’ll show them. Or they could block all search engines, and get no traffic whatsoever. As James Robertson notes, this appears to be more about a cash grab than it is about the way that search engines work. Techdirt asks whether newspapers can really be that clueless, and the short answer is: Yes.
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Okay, let me make sure I understand this. The, arguably, principal source of most inbound traffic to any site on the ‘net has a powerful tool that’s all about delivering eyeballs to content producers *for free* and the content producers want no part of it?
What the &^$* !!! Were these people born on the sun?
Are they somehow going to be happier when they are having to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for off and online marketing, plus paid search and portal placements to pull some miniscule fraction of the traffic that they used to have handed to them on a platter?
This is a joke, right? Please tell me it’s a joke, because pretty much everybody else in every other consumer category is already paying, in total (lemme check the numbers…oh ya) BILLIONS for the *exact same service*. Gimme a bloody break. These kids need to get out more.
– Stuart
I agree, Stuart. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, to tell you the truth. I think maybe Google should call up the WNA and say “Fine, we won’t index your stuff any more. Have a nice day,” and then see how long those newspaper sites lasted. It’s like that moronic idea someone raised a little while back of getting magazines and all kinds of other dead media and having them create their own little walled garden so they could “compete with Google.” Give your head a shake, boys.
Look, I’m not saying that I’ve written the How To Make Money As A Newspaper In The 21st Century book (though if anybody’d like to pay me to ;-)), but CLEARLY cutting off a valuable, free sourch of reach is not part of paving the road to success. I mean, imagine if GOOG had similar services focused on aggregating content completely relevant in other categories. Many folks would be lined up to pay to be there.
Oh, wait, that’s paid search.
– Stuart
[...] As for newspapers, debate is still all over the map about how to offer content online — and I should know, because we’ve had (and are having) plenty of that kind of debate at globeandmail.com. Is the subscription model working? Does it make sense to combine that with a partial “pay wall” as the Globe does and the New York Times recently started doing — or should content be free and advertising carry the freight? Does Google actually help, or is it stealing content in some way as the European Newspaper Publishers contend (that last one is the reddest herring I’ve probably ever seen, as I’ve mentioned before). [...]
[...] Sam has apparently decided to parrot the line taken by a Belgian copyright agency and by the World Newspaper Association, among others, who argue that Google News is “stealing” content from newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune (which Zell just acquired), and needs to be stopped. This simply isn’t true, as I have argued before, including here and here. On the contrary, newspapers get a tremendous benefit from being indexed by Google News, just as websites get a tremendous benefit from being indexed by Google’s search. [...]
[...] Sam has apparently decided to parrot the line taken by a Belgian copyright agency and by the World Newspaper Association, among others, who argue that Google News is “stealing” content from newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune (which Zell just acquired), and needs to be stopped. This simply isn’t true, as I have argued before, including here and here. On the contrary, newspapers get a tremendous benefit from being indexed by Google News, just as websites get a tremendous benefit from being indexed by Google’s search. [...]