Newspaper Lobbyists Take Aim at Google News

Hitokiri writes "Now that Google News is out of beta the newspaper publishers are starting to take notice. It's important to note that no legal action has taken place yet, but still, there seems to be a battle on the horizon." From the article: "'They're building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content,' Ali Rahnema, managing director of the association, told Reuters in an interview. 'The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article -- it's for the courts to decide whether that's a copyright violation or not.'"

Comments

Fair Use

[elbenito69]

I'd call it fair use, advertising for the news sources even, but of course I'm probably biased because Google News is just so damn convienent.

Re:Fair Use

[rmoehring]

Quiet down and pay for the rights to see the same AP or Reuters article on 200 different web sites. It's the Capitalist way.

Re:Fair Use

[grogdamighty]

Yeah, I fail to see how this is really any different from a newstand: headlines and teasers are used to lure you to the publisher's website. Why complain about free advertising?

Re:Fair Use

[tomhudson]

I'd tell the newspapers to be careful of what they ask for - they might just end up getting it:

'The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article -- it's for the courts to decide whether that's a copyright violation or not.'"

Don't be surprised if at least quoting the first few lines ends up being fair use. Besides, how do they expect their own online content to be seen if it isn't indexed - google could charge them instead of doing it for free. Its not like I'm going to go and find all these news items on my own.

Re:Fair Use

[sirnuke]

I wonder if the newspapers have considered that a majority of Google News reader probably won't go to their site unless the user see an interesting article on google news? Why pay for advertising when you can get someone else to do it for you for free?

Re:Fair Use

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

There is a real question of law here, but I consider that there is a case against Google. Indexing does not fall into any of the protected classes of use, has obvious commercial value and a clear, negative effect upon the value of the copyrighted work.

The courts have already ruled that Google cache qualifies under this, and have ruled a system nearly identical to Google images is fair use. Providing a thumbnail and a few sentences so that people can find something is almost certainly fair use in keeping with existing precedent. That is why no one has bothered to sue them over it.

Re:Fair Use

[Cal Paterson]

Most of these newspapers seems to be only interested because they think they may be able to get money out of sueing Google. If Google offered this as some kind of advertising agreement which they paid for, my guess would be that it would be pretty popular.

Re:Fair Use

[jez9999]

I'd rather be a newspaper. You seem to be forgetting that they too can compete on the net and just drop the physical paper when/if it gets too unprofitable. Not sure why you're thinking internet-only news operations have an advantage there.

Re:Fair Use

[Buran]

Bingo.

Gee, let's see. Would I rather pay 50 cents (or whatever it is) to get a space-wasting dirty tree-killing truck-polluting pile of paper with an erroneous "Miners rescued alive" headline, or view the news, no clutter/pollution/tree-killing required, online, with the CORRECT INFORMATION?

Plus, I can read what I want, be linked to other sources, read in the order I want without having to make piles all over the floor, worry about pages being out of order, and I can even easily e-mail links or text of stories to others.

Gee. I think I'll stay a web reader for a good long time.

Re:Fair Use

[Sen.NullProcPntr]

...if a site does not like their content to be indexed, then google will remove it...

Isn't that already handled by the /robots.txt file?

Google supposedly honers the Disallow statement.
Are things different when they go after a newspaper web site?

Re:Fair Use

[kponto]

The ironic thing is, if Google had simply "charged for the privelege" of being listed on Google News, as opposed to listing them for free, we probably wouldn't be hearing a peep.

It's all about perception.

What does Beta have to do with anything

[Tweekster]

Honestly, Just cause google called it beta before and now it doesnt did not change anything legally. They were still open for legal attack just as much then as now (which is yet to be determined) In all likelyhood they have nothing to worry about since they are simply aggregating data and well that is a use under copyright. Newspapers, quite bitching,. most people wouldnt even read your particular site if it werent for google News.

Re:What does Beta have to do with anything

[tomhudson]

Because google traditionally takes drops beta when its time to start making REAL money off of it ... expect to see some changes in Google News in the future. Maybe newspapers will have to PAY to be on Google News ...

Copyright violation?

[morgan_greywolf]

Last I checked, citing a few lines from a newspaper article had a term: 'fair use'.

Why wait this long? Google News has been running for YEARS, albeit with the 'beta' moniker.

Re:Copyright violation?

[interiot]

The fair use doctrine has been described as a murky concept in which it is often difficult to separate the lawful from the unlawful.

Also, most fair-use cases fall under comment-and-criticism... eg. it's okay to use one image of Homer Simpson on the Homer Simpson Wikipedia page, because that's one way to identify Homer while commenting about him.

Also, fair use says that companies that profit off of other's copyrighted work, and especially companies who diminish the profits of the copyright holders, is unlikely to have a judge rule in their favor.

Re:Copyright violation?

[Otter]

Last I checked, citing a few lines from a newspaper article had a term: 'fair use'.

It depends on the use. Quoting a few lines of a newspaper article in the middle of your own text is clearly protected. Stitching together multiple headlines, photos and first paragraphs to make a freestanding "newspaper" is not, although I don't think Google News rises to that level. At any rate, I'm sure they can afford plenty of attorneys.

The issue is whether the excerpted part loses the overall impact of the whole. The closest ruling that comes to mind is that porn thumbnails were ruled to be sufficiently arousing in their own right that copying them is infringement, not fair use.

Re:Copyright violation?

[guspasho]

Probably because Google News wasn't news until it came out of beta. Knowing how archaic most newspapers are when it comes to new technology, I bet they had to read about it on Google News.

Re:Copyright violation?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Also, fair use says that companies that profit off of other's copyrighted work, and especially companies who diminish the profits of the copyright holders, is unlikely to have a judge rule in their favor.

Check out Kelly V. Arribisoft. Basically it is ok to copy an entire copyrighted work, for the purpose of republishing an excerpt of that work, in an automated fashion, even when providing those excerpts coupled with advertising is done in order to make a profit. Basically, this rules Google images+advertisements is legal.

An excerpt that is a thumbnail and a chunk of text, that is a piece of a larger worker is not qualitatively any different and it is unlikely this sort of precedent (including the the handful of other cases that have all reached this same precedent) is going to overturned. In fact every district court in the US, sans one has filed a supporting brief. (I might mention that was the one where those random publishing houses filed against Google books.) Most lawyers and certainly IP lawyers are very aware that Google will almost certainly win a challenge against them, which is partly why no one with a clue files suits against them on these grounds anymore.

Huh?

[saikatguha266]

I thought the courts did decide: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004344.php

"A district court in Nevada has ruled that the Google Cache is a fair use."

Or does every industry want to file a separate suit asking the court to decide whether caching that industry's content is fair or not?

Re:Huh?

[rm69990]

Google Cache makes an entire web page available from Google's servers, Google News only makes a very tiny portion of the webpage (yes, despite being news, we are still talking about web pages here) available. Explain how it is any different?

How is this http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:qF-NV_J-7O8J:w ww.cnn.com/rssclick/2006/US/01/09/survivor.mine/%3 Fsection%3Dcnn_topstories+site:www.cnn.com+Miner&h l=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&lr=lang_en
any better than what Google News does?

(Sorry, too lazy to make a proper link)

BREAKING HEADLINE!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

BREAKING HEADLINE: Newspapers Still Doing Dumb Shit, Continue To Put Selves Out Of Business

Google does as paper does

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean Google is doing what every media outlet has done?
Built a news medium on the backs of other people lives, without paying for any of the content. When was the last time the news reporter payed you after publishing an article reporting your car accident, or that you were being sued.

Re:Google does as paper does

[Anonymous Coward]

Completely agree. In fact... people should sue the media for reporting on them without paying for the content! Then the media should sue Google News for reporting their articles! Then Google News should sue Slashdot for reporting on them! Wooohoo! Make everything louder than everything else! ;-)

Re:Google does as paper does

[Software]

Hmm, I don't recall any car accidents I've been in where I've taken pictures, then interviewed policemen, passersby, EMTs, and doctors. Then I didn't aggregate their responses, filter out the unimportant stuff, and write a coherent story of what happened. Since I haven't done any of that, I wouldn't expect to be paid as if I had.

I don't know if whether Google's usage is "fair use" or not. But it's not fair to say that journalists "built a news medium on the backs of other people lives, without paying for any of the content". They maintain their medium by researching the events and describing them for people who weren't there, and that's a service that many people (myself included) find valuable and willing to pay for. Journalists don't just regurgitate whatever they're told*.

* Certain former New York Times reporters (*cough* Judith Miller *cough*) excepted.

Re:Google does as paper does

[orac2]

Easy: go to fair.org

1) A link to the index page of an media watch dog is not putting up some numbers. Is this part of your scientifically rigourous approach to facts? I'm familiar with the FAIR website -- just where does it give numbers that show the proportion of journalists that fabricate stories, let alone indicate that it's "lots" of them? In fact, FAIR clearly doesn't believe that journalists "fabricat[e], or close to it" articles, or that the journalistic profession is endemically corrupt, or they wouldn't (from their "About Us" page) "defend working journalists [and work] with both activists and journalists. We maintain a regular dialogue with reporters at news outlets across the country, providing constructive critiques when called for and applauding exceptional, hard-hitting journalism." And many current and former subscribers to FAIR (including myself) are journalists, and FAIR is regularly quoted by journalists in both the mainstream and alternative press.

2) Pointing to scientfic literature is a non sequitor. Scientific papers, to have any value at all, confine themseleves to science. As the recent court case against intelligent design showed, attempting to broaden science to cover the full spectrum of human experience and thought is antithetical to what science is. Trying to compare scientific literaure with journalism is apples to oranges. Journalists, even when striving to be as accurate, well-researched and fair as humanely possible, don't write articles like scientific papers because it would be wholly inappropriate. Journalism has different objectives, with different audience demands. Scientific reportage of facts is designed to allow other scientists to recreate those the process by which those facts were derived. Journalists don't do that -- for example, because Woodruff and Bernstein didn't tell every reader of the Washington Post exactly how they too could reproduce their reporting, should readers have rejected the evidence of corruption within the Nixon administration?

3) By the way, if you're looking for universal factual purity in scientific comunity, you're on a fools errand: scientists are heavily incentivized to "make a name for themselves" too, with direct inducements in the form of academic and institutional positions and grant monies. Here's a hard statistic: The Journal of Cell Biology recently reported that some 25% of manuscripts submitted to it have had images that were manipulated in some way that violates their guidelines. This isn't to attack cell biology as a crock, just to let you know that science isn't some totem that you can fetishize into a gold standard by which to weigh journalism.

4) "I'm not talking about the deliberate deceptions that a number of journalists have been caught at, I'm talking about journalism itself" Ah, just as predicted, weasling. You originally wrote; "that's what a lot of [journalists] do. The bad part is that a lot of the effort that goes into their stories is fabrication or close to it.". A fabrication is a deliberate deception. Non-deliberate deception is usually covered under the terms 'bias' or 'error'-- the FAIR website can tell you more about this. And you weren't talking about journalism, you were talking about journalists, so you were talking about deliberate deceptions commited by a (still unspecified) number of individuals. You were also dismissing a commenter's opinion on the basis that they hadn't met any journalists. And again, if meeting journalists is your criteria for the worth of an opinion, just how many have you met?

Am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I missing something or doesn't Google News only link to new sites that have free content anyway?

Re:Am I missing something?

[pembo13]

No, didn't you know? They have a bot which goes onto password protected new sites, bute forces the password, scrapes all the new articles and media, copies it to their Google clusters, reformats the information into pages which decree that the stories have been investigated, reported, and brought to you by Google.

Re:Am I missing something?

[McGiraf]

"Am I missing something?"

Yes, the ads, you must be using adblocker or something.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Tango42]

What ads? I can usually tell when Adblock has removed something, and it doesn't remove text ads anyway, and that's what google mainly uses, and I see no adds on Google News.

I predict...

[xstonedogx]

...that Google's response will be, "If you don't want to be listed, you don't have to be listed. Bye."

It amazes me how willing people are to shoot themselves in the foot.

Re:I predict...

[OrangeDoor]

Precisely, they could opt out by by saying nobody is allowed to quote their articles. I doubt any paper would choose to opt out of it. This is just a struggling entity flailing around for something to hold onto. It's just them fearing the new technology and therefore fighting against it... (This is my first post on slashdot from a linux machine, it feels like a significant step for me).

Re:I predict...

[houghi]

So spammers must have an opt-in, yet Google must have an opt-out?

Not very clever of them.

[microarray]

From TFA:"The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article -- it's for the courts to decide whether that's a copyright violation or not."

Some companies PAY for a little link to their site to appear when there is a relevant Google search. These newspapers get indexed, and linked to, from a high traffic site, for FREE, and they are complaining. Instead of throwing lawyers at the problem, they should engage their brains for a moment and figure out which option is better for their business.

Re:Not very clever of them.

[amazon10x]

I think the reason they are so upset with this is because it makes the competitors more available.

Let's assume that Bob enjoys reading news on the internet. However, Bob does not know of these things referred to as "portals". Rather than pulling up 10 different windows (using internet explorer (Bob is an idiot, BTW) which makes it worse) for NYTimes, Washington Post, MSN, Yahoo, his local paper, and some others, Bob takes the lazy way out and uses only the NYTimes site because he doesn't like swapping windows.

Now Bob's friend comes along and tells Bob to go to news.google.com to get his news. Bob acquiesces and reads Google News from here on. Now Bob gets to see hundreds of different news sources rather than just the NYTimes. This is bad for the NYTimes so they sue Google.

I am not saying I agree with them suing, I believe it is fair use. However, I do see why they're suing.

The problem with most newspapers

[w3woody]

I think the problem with most newspapers is that by and large, they are news aggregators, not news reporters. Most local newspapers have a staff of reporters who go out and report local news--but for the bulk of their content they rely upon content that is not written in-house. (Wire services such as Reuters, AP and UPI, along with syndicated columns, form the bulk of most newspapers today--which means that many of the national articles in the Fresno Bee, say, are the same articles that appear in the Washington Post.)

So while it's sort of simplistic to say that this is all fair use, the reality is that Google News, by making a better mouse trap (dynamic news aggregation) is--probably without even realizing it--competing head to head with local newspapers.

Re:The problem with most newspapers

[urbaneassault]

I'm a huge supporter of Google News, but keep in mind that newspapers pay top dollar to syndicate UPI, AP, and Reuters - costs that Google doesn't incur. But, considering the aggregation side of what Google does, I think it's completely within fair use. If they started charging to view the aggregate feeds, or hosted the full text of the articles without permission, that would be a much different story.

Re:The problem with most newspapers

[greenstork]

The key difference being that those newpapers you mentioned actually pay for AP and Reuters content while Google does not pay anyone for news featured.

Re:The problem with most newspapers

[Tweekster]

so what? that sounds exactly fair. Google is giving the person a teaser, a tiny bit of the info, useless on its own Reuters etc is giving the whole piece of content. there is a very clear and gaping distinction between the two

Re:The problem with most newspapers

[Forbman]

No, it's not competing with local newspapers. National/world news is commodity information. Winston-Salem NC is not likely to write a story wholely unrelated to NC about McMinnville, OR. So, if I look up anything about "Evergreen Aviation", chances are any news items that show up in GoogleNews are going to be in the Yamhill Observer, Salem Statesman-Journal or Oregonian. Not really competing with them, especially if the best sources for looking at ancillary information to whatever GoogleNews pulled up is from the papers' websites...

It is odd, though, finding interesting Superbowl articles in the Xinhua Times...

Robots.txt

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet has ways that the news companies can use if they don't want Google crawling them.
By not stopping Google by using the standard mechanism, I'd agree that it is fair use for Google to use the data they provide.

Re:I'll remember this statement.

[welcher]

They pay for the Reuters or AP wire - that's how wire services make their money

Why do I get the feeling...

[Guppy06]

That by "newspapers" we're talking about the New York Times, the Washington Post, and not much else? It seems that, more often than not, the first link for a particualr news story is a smaller newspaper that doesn't exactly have a nationwide readership, giving their sites (and banner ads) far more traffic than they'd have without news aggregators. The only papers I could see complaining are the ones that already have their own national and/or global distribution channels.

Re:Why do I get the feeling...

[sheddd]

I imagine you're mostly correct (Big papers hate google, little ones love them)...
Out of curiosity I googled a bit and the Lobbyist group is funded by The newspaper assn of america which has a bunch of big and small members, one of which is the New York Times... interesting robots.txt on their site:

# robots.txt, www.nytimes.com 3/24/2005
#
User-agent: *
Disallow: /pages/college/
Disallow: /college/
Disallow: /library/
Disallow: /learning/
Disallow: /aponline/
Disallow: /reuters/
Disallow: /cnet/
Disallow: /partners/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: /indexes/
Disallow: /thestreet/
Disallow: /nytimes-partners/
Disallow: /financialtimes/
Allow: /pages/
Allow: /2003/
Allow: /2004/
Allow: /2005/
Allow: /top/
Allow: /ref/
Allow: /services/xml/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

Re:Why do I get the feeling...

[tintub]

Just thought I'd add that what that means is that they are explicitly allowing Mediapartners-Google* access to all files, not disallowing. If they wanted to disallow google, they would need the line Disallow: /

Google News:Real News :: Google Earth:GIS

[stanwirth]

Much as I like Google, I've stopped reading the Google News much at all. First of all articles get the /. effect, and it's much the same coverage as you see in the NYT and BBC anyway. Worse, because it has a "popularity" filter on it. If I were in a field that relied on any more accurate coverage of world events, I'd have to go to primary sources anyway.

I tried Google Earth the other day too, and it has the same kind of "filter" -- eye candy for Africa, but if you have to look at a non-tourist spot, you're pretty much SOL. Since I'm in a field that does rely on more accurate GIS, I use real GIS software and data.

Re:Google News:Real News :: Google Earth:GIS

[Wyatt Earp]

I don't agree with the assessment of Google Earth. There is alot of "non-tourist" regions in higher res photos than just the tourist spots. For example, rural central Oregon isn't exactly a tourist region, yet it's higher res than say Baghdad Iraq.

I'll do a quick, non-tourist tour for crap res or higher res.

Central Oregon - Higher Res
Mountain Home AFB Idaho - Higher Res
North Central Navada - A mix
Buffalo Wyoming - Higher Res
ANWR - medium res
Eagle Butte SD - Low, low res
Pyongyang DPRK - Higher res
Rangoon Burma - medium res
Desert south of Riyadh - higher res

So really, for a free application, it does a good job.

let me finish your sentence for you, Mr. Rahnema

[SuperBanana]

"The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article"

Let me finish that sentence for you, Mr. Rahnema:

"...and using it to send viewers to Association member's webpages, bringing us new readers, and generating ad revenue we ordinarily wouldn't have. Sadly, it means we all have to compete against each other, whereas before, we enjoyed regional favoritism. We're absolutely terrified that someone in Boston might find better coverage of a story on the BBC's website, or Washington Post. Or that they can find as much as they want about Elephants, instead of having to read an entire paper, or poke around our site. And they won't pay for the privledge of searching our archives. Especially since much of the time, all we do is parrot an AP/Reuters wire story, word for word....we're terribly concerned about all this."

Hey, if they don't like it- they can always redirect any hit with a referral from news.google.com to "Sorry, we don't support google news." There's also nothing stopping them from blocking all the googlebot crawlers- either by IP range, or browser ID.

Except that then they'd loose a lot of viewers, and become a black hole to the world's most popular search engine. So instead, they run to the legislature...

Pot, kettle, black.

[AnotherBlackHat]

They're building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content,

Last I checked, newspapers don't pay for the quotes they publish either.

Isn't news supposed to be the reporting of facts, not a creative work?

-- Should you believe authority without question?

I suspect

[gr8_phk]

"...that Google's response will be, "If you don't want to be listed, you don't have to be listed. Bye."

It amazes me how willing people are to shoot themselves in the foot."

I suspect the larger news sources would rather have the practice halted completely. This would force people to go to a major news site (them) rather than google which sometimes leads people to lesser news sites. Slashdot has been linked from a Google headline more than once. Big news sites don't want people to be aware of any alternatives.

Smaller news sources probably like the publicity Google provides them. Larger news sources probably don't like the publicity Google provides those smaller competitors.

They don't want to opt out, they want it all to just go away.

Re:I suspect

[gknoy]

If Google were to make it an opt-in (or out, even) service for news sites, and free, the smaller news sites might flock to it, ensuring publicity -- whereas the larger sites will simply opt out.

But I'd rather see if this is ruled fair use. :)

if i go to a newstand

[circletimessquare]

i can scan the front page headlines of about 10 different newspapers without buying a newspaper. but if i am interested in knowing more in depth, i'll buy the newspaper

if i go to google news, same thing: i can scan the front page headlines of about 10 different newspapers without visiting the newspaper's site. but if i am interested in knowing more in depth, i'll click on the link and go to the newspaper's site

are newspapers now going to prohibit people from looking at newsstands unless they intend to buy a newspaper?

this is utterly ridiculous. do newspaper sites want no traffic? how the heck do they expect people to find their stories?

Re:I'll remember this statement.

[undeadly]

First, AFP more probably. Second, they bought the right to copy it so they are not hypocrites. Google didn't bought that right.

In civilized countries the article is clearly marked as comming from a "news" agency lime AP or Reuters. No doubt about it.

Other sites

[Chowderbags]

What about a site like Drudge Report? Or even any blog out there? Sure, they may not be as automated as Google, but will the courts see it that way? I hardly see it as an issue of copyright if a site not only cites a source, but links back to get the whole story. Besides, this is the industry that thrives on AP and Reuters stories to fill most of it's content. Well, that and the random reporters that steal from Wikipedia: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/15/151321 6

"Shooting themselves in the foot" is right

[GPS Pilot]

Thanks to Google News, I've made hundreds of visits to news organizations' web sites that I wouldn't otherwise have made. And on all of those visits, I've viewed ads for which the news organizations earned money.

Silly journalists...

How is this?

[rm69990]

Someone please explain to me how this is any different than Google Search indexing these exact same articles and making the first few lines available through their search engine? Or Google images making these exact same images available from Google's servers?

Either way, Google is still directing web traffic to their sites. There are a lot of news articles on various sites I would have never read if it weren't for Google news. I don't have time to track thousands of different online news outlets, so Google does it for me. I have even *gasp* clicked on ads after being redirected to the news vendors website. Even more shocking, there has been a few (5 actually) news outlets who's RSS feeds I have subscribed to after reading a few articles of theirs linked to from Google News.

Oh well, there are no laws against stupidity. This is almost as dumb as book publishers getting in a panic over Google Book Search, which is free advertising as far as I'm concerned. Or do they fear people will be satisfied with the page shown on Google Book Search and not buy the full book? Generally, when I want to read a book, I want to read the full book. The same thing with the news. I don't read the Google News homepage and not go to the full source.

How Ironic

[windowpain]

Companies pay pay Google to place (very brief) ads in search results of particular words. Google News uses much more enticing excerpts from news sites that a user must click on if he or she wants to read the full article excerpted. The link clicked on goes directly to the news site's (ad-laden, revenue-generating) page.

Newspapers have a problem with this? Google should comply with any news source that wants to be excluded from Google News. And then have their salepeople call on them and see if they want to buy Google Adwords on the Google News page.

What would this mean for Slashdot?

[Disposable Rob]

"'They're building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content,' Ali Rahnema, managing director of the association, told Reuters in an interview. 'The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article -- it's for the courts to decide whether that's a copyright violation or not.'"

Except for the occasional unique content like interviews, doesnt this describe Slashdot? Along with Fark, Digg and countless blogs whose entire sites who report what others are reporting, except they use people instead of Google's crawlers.

Town Criers Lobby congress

[fermion]

The considlated federation of town criers, villiage idiots, and buggy whip vendors, are petitioning congress to protect them against thin sheets of papers printed with daily news and advertisements. These so-called news-papers, made practical by recent innovation in moveable type. The town criers insist that they have spent much effort organizing a network of reliable informants, and that the news-papers are able to undercutting traditional news outlets because they do not have such expenses. Even though the criers are fully attributed, they object as this may cut down on public contact and potential revenue.

In addition, the villiage idiot objects as these papers also supply a high quality entertainment, thusly potentially destroying the trade of villiage idiot and the untold community benifit such a person provides. The buggy whip manufacturers are concerned as the papers offer non-local cheaper alternatives to the buggy whip, and prints stories about a post-horse power economy which threatens the entire industry.

Foreign News Would Love Our Audience

[comforteagle]

I run a news crap-filter called 180n.com which allows the reader to determine which of the stories are actually worth reading & 9/10 the sources are foreign news outlets like the BBC, India Times, even Aljezerra. US News Media don't do "news" anymore. They're media outlets the same as Oprah & Survivor. Reel you in with sensational bullshit and try to hold you there as long as possible by promising something worthwhile... just after this break or right after you view these ads for classmates.com!

These people are stupider than the RIAA

[voss]

I would NEVER read their newspaper websites if it were not for
Google News. Google news gives them free pagehits which exposes
their newspaper and their web page ADVERTISERS to a larger audience.

If I were a newspaper publisher I wouldnt be angry about my newspaper
being in Google news, I would be angry about my newspaper not listed
among the first three sources.

All google news is a News search engine with links to news sites.

My god Google news is GIVING YOU BUSINESS without charging you....
Google news has your newspaper websites RELEVANT again...more so
than TV news. Are you newspaper publishers really that fracking
STUPID as to punish them for it?

Theft, pure and simple

[Nom du Keyboard]

What a crock! You've put the stuff out there for free. Google makes your content a million times more findable. And now your intent is to rob them for being a value added supplier simply because they have a lot of money that you want. Newspapers are the thieves in this, pure and simple.

If you don't like being indexed, put a frigging robots.txt file on your site and watch how much you'll be saving in bandwidth costs afterwards as your traffic plummets.

The newspapers not only need to lose on this one -- they need to lose big!

Re:Copyright violation? Why wait? $$$

[Nom du Keyboard]

Why wait this long? Google News has been running for YEARS, albeit with the 'beta' moniker.

Because Google has lots of money now, and they want to get their hands on it. Rule number 1 in laywer school: Don't sue poor people because they can't pay.

robots.txt

[cnb]

Why aren't they simply blocking google using robots.txt if they don't want to be listed?

you're very confused

[geekee]

"Quiet down and pay for the rights to see the same AP or Reuters article on 200 different web sites. It's the Capitalist way."

Since when have you ever paid for an AP or Reuters news story online. The news sites posting them pay for them, and use advertising to subsidize. Google doesn't pay for linking to them and uses advertising to subsidize their non-payments.

Re:you're very confused

[Frostalicious]

Google doesn't pay for linking to them and uses advertising to subsidize their non-payments.

Most people WANT Google to link to them, and even pay Google for the privilege. Why is this different?

Re:you're very confused

[thirdrock]

Google doesn't pay for linking to them and uses advertising to subsidize their non-payments.

You're not a very accomplished liar are you? Show me one advertisement on news.google.com and you might have a point.

Since when have you ever paid for an AP or Reuters news story online. The news sites posting them pay for them, and use advertising to subsidize.

Yes, and they create almost no news of their own. In other words, what Google is showing is that all of these so called 'NewsPapers' are nothing more than distribution channels for syndicated news. Or to put it another way, there is no reason to buy one newpaper as opposed to any other.

I think the real issue here is that the concept of the 'Newspaper' is dying. With the Internet, news is obiquitous, instantaneous and democratic. One can invision a future where consumers will subscribe to a single news service and then filter by region, topic etc. All journalists will then be working for the syndication companies.

This turns the whole news business model upside down. Currently, "The New York Times" is a brand that is used to sell advertising space to corporate advertisers. There is a huge vested interest in sustaining this model for a number of reasons.
1) Advertisers influence the type of news that is printed. In other words, the flow of information is influenced, nay corrupted, by the corporate world.
2) Huge amounts of money have been invested into these news 'brands'. Changing the model dilutes the value of the brand,effectively causing a capital loss.
3) Following on from (1), information flow influences political thought. If the newpaper influences political thinking, and advertisers influence the newspaper, then the advertisers (corporations) indirectly influence political thought. This is a powerfull lever that nobody would want to give up.

YMMV

Re:you're very confused

[drivekiller]

Almost.

Google provides me a service (location of interesting stories) but they don't provide the actual stories. Guess what, idiot lobbyists? If you don't want your site to show up in Google News, you can accomplish this with a robots.txt file. Remedy is trivial -- your issue is a thinly disguised protection racket.

But you were probably being sarcastic anyway.

Re:you're very confused

[Magic5Ball]

Most people WANT Google to link to them, and even pay Google for the privilege. Why is this different?

Many news web sites are not treated as profit centers, but as expenses. I know of a number of smaller papers (circulation < 250,000) that see 90 per cent of web traffic come from Google, which is next to useless for their readership numbers and local advertising. The lucky ones use Google ads to pay for the bandwidth used by random Google visitors, the others are SOL.

<bias>As someone who runs the IT for a weekly community paper in addition to my day job, I'm currently trying various methods of reducing the Google effect to less than its current (and steadily increasing by 5-10% per month) 4.5 Mb/s of bandwidth usage for hits from Google search results. It's not really a cost center for us, but I would like to use the bandwidth for faster e-mail attachment downloads and such...

Soylent reading

[cnflctd]

Easy solution: Make paper from the skin of corpses. "People is ... people!!!"

they could squash them ...

[zogger]

...like a bug, easy.

Scenario 1: Googlenews could just drop a small to them sum and carry AP, UPI, AFP, etc stories under their own brand name, and not even bother with other papers. They could then offer the now redundant newspapers to pay them to be indexed.

Scenario 2, if for some reason number 1 wouldn't work: Google could put out the internet call for independent reporters en masse around the world, offer a small fee per word/pic/video for accepted and published product, and probably squash the news syndicators. They could have 10,000 reporters (whatever, pick a big number that would work) within a week if they wanted to, every language, every location, every topic. Maybe even squash or at least scare the big broadcast networks for that matter. Most of them use freelancers for a boatload of their product anyway, so quite a few might be lured into working for Google. They could turn this whole argument around, and it would be the local newspapers and broadcasters paying Google serious folding money for content and indexing services, instead of complaining about them "stealing their stuff", which is a crock anyway.

The only dead tree paper I get anymore is the freebie that comes in the mailbox, and that gets used for woodstove fire starter kindling, it's still good for that. I honestly don't care about local high school sports scores. All that is left with local papers of any value is a smidgen of local politics and the classified ads, and there the ads are being taken over by the freebie "ads only" papers you see. The big city papers are even worse, their news is exactly the same as everyone else's, so there's little need for the dead trees version unless you just like to rattle newspaper around at the breakfast table, and also hence why I never "register" to go to any of their website versions, it's like, why do you need to do that when there's 500 other sites with the same exact information and don't require registration? You want my eyeballs to view your site and ads, don't make me register for that privelege, because I won't.

The so called "main stream news" needs a big shakeup anyway, IMO, they need to get scared and go back to their roots a little more, and rediscover real journalism and get rid of being parrots of a few official party lines.

I'm a serious old time news junky, I taught myself to read by reading the newspaper headlines compared to the TV news headlines before I went to kindergarten, and the newspapers have lost *me* as a customer because it just gradually turned into corporate shilling crap and government propoganda mixed in with bread and cicuses hollyweird news and sports gods "scores". And they wonder why their product is being abandoned......

Google News: Not as important as you think

[Conright]

I love it how so many of you think not being listed on Google News is the end of a newspaper's career. You do not realize that Google News is not even in the top 10 for most popular news site on the internet.

Here is a quote from a Marketwatch article today: "Yahoo! News is No. 1, with 24.6 million unique visitors in December, up 15% from a year ago, followed by AOL at No. 4, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Google News stands at No.13 with 7.8 million unique visitors..."

I have a dog in this fight.

[aliscool]

My site, linked below on my sig if you care to look is 90% content driven RSS and RDF feeds, of news and blogs, which are provided by the News site or blog site for exactly this type of aggregation via a feed.
Although I get content for my viewers, it is actually also a service for the news or blog site I aggregate. Unless they fully feed the article my readers get teasers which link the the parent site for the full article. I do have moderation and comments related to the news article in question... but the teaser drive folks to the parent site.
What they get for providing me a steady content stream is free linkage and traffic from my site. I am more than happy to provide it.... but its a I scratch your back you scratch mine arrangement.
Google does the same thing on a MUCH larger scale. But the principles apply.

nonsense

[idlake]

On the other hand, publishers are not code jockeys (and robots.txt was not in the original spec).

Oh, please, how naive can you be? The NYT web site was created by highly paid, experienced web designers and developers. Of course, they know about robots.txt, and any court would expect a company of that wealth and publishing experience to hire people that know about it.

And even if the NYT employees were so incompetent that they don't know, Google tells them about it. Google even gives you a means for removing your site immediately.

Re:nonsense

[BasilBrush]

Absolutely. This makes a complete nonsense out of the newspapers claims. Trouble is, what the newspapers want is not for their site to be removed from the index, but for Google News to be shut down, as they see it as a competition as a news portal. If they only withdraw from being indexed themselves, they'll only succeed in reducing traffic to their site, whilst Google News is every bit as much as a news portal competitor as before.

another incorrect use of "content"

[brre]

They're building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content

They don't have to. The content is free. It's the expression that's copyrighted.

What he means, of course, is aggregators aren't paying for the articles, the news, the writing, the copy, the expression.

Re:I'll remember this statement.

[Keith McClary]

they bought the right to copy it so they are not hypocrites. Google didn't bought that right.

Google could easily afford to buy "wire service" feeds. Then Google wouldn't need to link to all those "newspaper" sites - they could could link to the full article on a Google site with ads.