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Google CEO Warns Newspapers Not To Anger Readers
Barence writes "Google CEO Eric Schmidt has hit back at newspaper bosses, warning them that they risk alienating readers in their war against news aggregators such as Google News. 'I would encourage everybody to think in terms of what your reader wants,' Schmidt said at a conference for the Newspaper Association of America. 'These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more.' Schmidt's rebuke follows a sustained attack on Google by newspaper bosses such as Rupert Murdoch, who have accused the search giant of 'stealing' their content without payment."
Schmidt also suggested that newspapers need to expand their distribution methods to make better use of mobile technology, and a NY Times piece argues that the Associated Press' struggle against aggregators is futile since they're largely trying to give news stories to consumers for free anyway.
He makes a pretty common argument that Google News actually helps every news service as opposed to the AP's claims of hurting them (maybe even stealing from them).
And then he defaults to fair use:
In the U.S., the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the US Copyright Act allows us to show snippets and links. The fair use doctrine protects transformative uses of content, such as indexing to make it easier to find. Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rightsholder, in this case newspaper or wire service, to remove their content from our index -- all they have to do is ask us or implement simple technical standards such as robots.txt or metatags.
And remember folks, he is a lawyer (although I am not).
My work here is dung.
First they discontinued my evening paper & replaced it with the morning paper, which I don't like. Then the idiot delivery woman keeps throwing papers in the middle of the street, where they get squashed by passing cars (or disappear completely). I've complained but the news executives have done naught to fix the problem. What's this have to do with the article? It all comes-back to the same root problem:
- They care more about the almighty $$$ then they do about keeping the customer happy, and that is why they will ultimately fail.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
"Being as this is Google, the most powerful media aggregator in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?"
Eric Schmidt's
When it comes to what news "consumers" want, Google CEO "gets it". Old media CEO's don't. Film at eleven.
OK, so this ain't exactly news, but jeezuz, how hard is it to grasp the fact that a large number of the eyeballs viewing your "news" arrive at your web site via a link on Google news?
Hey, Eric. Cut one or two of them off for a week. Given them a heads up first, and suggest that they pay attention to their traffic numbers. Then let's all ask their board of directors what they think of how things are going when no one "steals" their content.
I wouldn't end up on these newspapers sites without the aggregators "stealing" their content. Going to a single source is like you have a political bias that you want reinforcing.
Having said that, I come to slashdot for all my Microsoft news so...
What he says seems pretty self serving. Sure they risk alienating readers. The problem is that google is pulling them away from their own web sites where they hope to generate revenue.
Income is already bad enough that papers are going bankrupt. Bloggers are not the most reliable way to get accurate news.
His argument makes sense to him because he draws revenue from being an aggregator.
I seem digital delivery from news papers within the next ten years and google will be cut out of it totally.
The behavior of the newspapers in regards to services like Google News has always surprised me. Google is providing the papers another means of distributing content, and its at no cost to the paper. Personally, if I see a snippet of news on something that interests me, I will click the link and go straight to the news source's website. I have always assumed that that is a desirable outcome for the news sources.
The only thing that Google does is provide the consumer with more options. Since I use Google News I am more likely to use multiple sources for my national and global news. I guess this scares the newspapers a little bit.
I'd be willing to bet that there's a growing chunk of the online population who, like my self, may read content from newspapers, but only do so through online aggregators.
I never check the NYT, Washington Post, NY Post, etc. directly - either the paper or online versions. If I read an article at any of their sites, it's because it's been linked to on a blog or came through in an RSS feed from an aggregator.
They're assuming that people use their websites the way people use their newspapers, and that's probably not the case anymore, and surely won't be in the future.
Imagine if Google News really became... Google News. They could produce their own centent, and then to the AP's horror, syndicate it themselves... or, syndicate it to online papers in exchange for allowing them to place the ads on those pages.
What will be the value of Google News when the real content providers shut thier doors?
This isn't Google's doing - I think they do help get people to the News sites, the problem is Craiglist - they have taken the classified revenue from the Newspapers and The internet in general - why buy a newspapaer or put an add in one when the web is free.
It is sad - the newspapers are the modern day buggy whip manufacturer. There is not a way to save them. The big difference is that there will be a gap before alternate sources of good content come on line.
I don't think many CEOs would have the guts to say the truth so clearly.
Can someone please explain to me what exactly is these newspapers are complaining about? I just don't get it. If Google stripped all the content off the websites of these newspapers and attached their own ads to it, then I would see the problem, but that's not what they're doing.
Google News directs you to the newspaper's website. If I get to a nytimes.com article through Google News, it's the exact same website as I would be served if I typed nytimes.com into my browser and navigated to the website. Same content, same ads. Google is giving them traffic, so I fail to see what the problem is.
Is it that there are also ads on the Google News page itself?
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Maybe papers should stop alienating readers by printing endless, shallow ideological bullshit. See the Los Angeles Times for a prime example of editors living in reality distortion bubbles, and an editorial page that has expanded to encompass the entire paper.
I use it because I can set up email alerts that let me scan a multitude of newspapers for certain keywords related to my business. The newspaper conglomerates themselves COULD have gotten together and put together a similar service, but they DIDN'T. Now google news is the only service that offers this. It's not google's fault that they have dragged their heals and clung desperately to the old model of doing things for so long.
I'll say to them what I would say to the movie and music industry: Adapt to the new way of doing things or don't complain when you suffer for your stubbornness.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
'These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more.'
He may be a lawyer, but he doesn't understand who the consumers are in the newspaper model.
Newspapers, like much of modern media, sell audiences to advertisers.
So asking the news media to think of their readers, is meaningless. They never do, except as a product to sell to the advertisers.
This is ultimately an Advertiser business.
ut DoubleClick's ads were often gaudy and irrelevant. They represented everything Page and Brin thought was wrong with the Internet
That was until they saw the True Light - now if you look them in the eye, you can the $$$$s in their eyes.
The Guardian Media Group has asked the Government to examine Google News and other content aggregators, claiming they contribute insufficiently to their income.
"The newspapers put their content up on the web for free and then Google, the freeloading bastards, tell people where to find it. We told them to pay up or stop using our stuff, and they said OK, they'd stop using our stuff! Not giving us free money is a clear abuse of Google's power.
"We need the Government to bring back balance, 'balance' defined as being able to make them give us money because we want it. You'd think the Internet wasn't invented to give newspapers and record companies free money!"
The newspaper group argues that traffic from search engines does not make up the cost of producing the content. "Ad revenue has collapsed, so search engine traffic doesn't bring in enough views to pay for itself. Our inability to sell ads is clearly Google's problem. It's also the BBC's problem, so we should get some of the TV licencing fee too."
The Guardian suggests the exploration of new models that "require fair acknowledgement of the value that our content creates, both on our own site through advertising and 'at the edges' in the world of search and aggregation. Basically, they should just give us money because we want it. And the music industry too. How about a bailout? Go on, gi's it."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The big media companies had over 8 years to start throwing hardball questions at ol W, their failure to do so has rendered them useless in my eyes & in the eyes of many Americans.
Nowadays, it is pretty much assumed that if you want the full story on any given news article you need to go to at least 3 different sources (with at least 2 of them being non-mainstream.)
I dont even bother with newspapers anymore, just like teevee news, theyre nothing but fear and fluff. You dont get anything in-depth stories except about the kitty-cat who found his way home over 1000 miles.
You guys made this bed, you lie in it.
That's like telling a TV network to care what their viewer wants.
Nobody cares about readers or viewers. What counts is the ads. Basically, the content is the necessary evil around the ads.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Google should not be summarizing content created by the news organizations. A Headline link like Drudge Report does is acceptable, that is well established practice, but to print that first paragraph is wrong without the authors consent. If the different news media chose to allow the content to be summarized then it is their choice. The creator of the media should be given the revenue from that first hit; where you decide if the story is worth reading or not, not the news aggregator. We have been spoiled with a lot of free content. We should not assume we have a right to it. Especially a media giant like Google.
The average person wants everything for nothing. As long as they have the illusion that they're getting it, they're happy. That's the current situation.
Schmidt is a leech happily feeding on content provided by the newspapers. Their ad revenue is tanking because it's so easy to get news free (and that's exactly what people are doing), but the papers still have to pay their reporters and editors. Anybody who believes bloggers and those overpaid drones on cable news can do the job a decent investigative reporter does is a damned fool. Right now, the only people employing such reporters are newspapers (yes, I know there are exceptions...they're rare and irrelevant to the point). When real content is gone, Schmidt will happily switch gears to supply the latest images of some starlet's crotch...which is what a lot of people want, after all.
Meanwhile, the access to real information, which helps keep society free, dies off.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
the onion isnt in trouble, and they actually make up their own original news.
all reporters steal their content from things that happen in real life and theyre complaining that their "original content" is being stolen?
when you go to a newspapers website, are there videos? are there audio stories? is there good writing anywhere? i dont really see the attraction to not adapting to whats new, except for people who enjoy complaining.
,,,And how did I find this piece of news this morning? Why Google News, of course. I read the Times piece and /.
Also, the newspapers need to get a grip and read their logs and just see how much referral traffic comes from either google, or outside their local geo. I think they'd be surprised.
if newspaper organizations do not have viable model. In essence good quality news requires presence of high quality tools and personnel that can be deployed rapidly across the globe to cover a wide range of events. If they cannot generate sufficient money from their effort and go down who will do this job ?
News aggregators need news for aggregation. I havent heard anyone in slashdot help address this fundamental challenge.
this is not a tirade against google or argument in favor of newspapers but just wondering what is the new model of news media that we are conceiving if all or most of the traditional news media go down. User generated news is has too much noise to have any validity and lacks quality and predictability.
I strongly believe news and search go hand-in-hand, and news outlets can only gain from this pairing of services. If I'm searching for a tidbit of news I'll often get my answer on a non-local news website that I'd never have visited otherwise. For instance, in recent memory I've read some impressive technology journalism in a Salt Lake City publication, and other interesting pieces in the Christian Science Monitor and Al Jazeera, so I'm compelled to trust these outlets again in the future.
I trust Google enough that it will offer up the most relevant articles based on my search queries, and relevance is often more important to me than the source of my news. I suspect local newspapers, and even wire services like AP and Reuters, are simply afraid of suddenly having to compete on the same footing.
Schmidt's comments in TFA are absolutely correct. People are searching for news, and if you exclude your service from search you are effectively opting out of eager readership.
His newspapers are gutter trash, pushing populist dumbness and overreaction to the masses instead of the news and reasoned analysis.
Any Brit who buys The Sun should be ashamed of himself considering the paper's record, including the reporting of the Hillsborough disaster and countless things since, including last week's G20 demonstrations where an innocent man (not a protester) was attacked by police and subsequently had a heart attack and died, and The Sun was well in there slurping up the police account of the situation hook line and sinker. Journalists! HAhAHA.
I stopped getting a local newspaper because they wouldn't sell a Sunday only subscription.
I didn't want Thur-Sun for the same price.
I didn't want Sat-Sun for the same price.
I want Sunday AND only Sunday newspapers.
We weren't reading the other days and just had to recycle them. That sucked.
I was a newspaper boy many, many years ago in 2 different states. I had "Sunday-only" customers and was very happy to serve them. Then, the closer you were to the city that published the news, the more daily subscribers I had. At one place my Sunday subscriptions were 10x the count the dailies. At the other, much closer to the city, perhaps 10% got a Sunday-only subscription.
Please tip your newspaper boy for all those mornings he was up at 4am and walking during rain, snow, 40-below weather and placed your newspaper inside your outside storm door. For 6 weeks, I delivered with a broken foot, in a cast, double bagged to keep the rain out. I think I wouldn't tip anyone throwing newspapers from a car.
Personally I stopped reading newspapers years ago, they are a vastly outdated form of media.
I get my news from the BBC news website and a couple of other news websites on the internet, this content is paid for. The BBC collects a TV license fee from us here in the UK and some of that money goes to their online division. Sky charges a subscription to access their channels. etc.
I can get my morning headlines via RSS Feed on my cellphone, the BBC even do a mobile specific video area where I can watch headlines and news on my cellphone while on the train into work.
The news paper companies need to adapt to the changes in media delivery. Most cellphone companies offer an unlimited data package now, I'm with Vodafone and they do one for £7/month. So given that I can access all this news and content in real time on my phone, why would I want to buy a newspaper?
I've totally given up ABC news because it redirects so many times it thwacks my back button. Not on my PC, that's fine, but I typically read the news during down time the rest of the day, ex: waiting for food, before class, at the coffee shop, etc...
ABCNews is already gone, I wish google had an option to remove a news source. NYTimes killed my WM5 phone(as in crashed iexplorer.exe, not that difficult of a task) but I think they fixed it before I switched to the 'droid.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/apr/06/google-wallstreetjournal "Most newspapers would prefer a fraction of their current traffic in exchange for a core set of engaged, frequent, transacting users."
I'd argue that the 'would' should be a 'should'.
It's probably not what Google wants to hear, but more visits and ad views doesn't necessarilly help most newspaper sites as they won't sell out their ad inventory anyway. What the newspapers need to do is focus on building up a bigger core audience (through building authorative links to informative, well written articles) who are more likely to interact with the site and add value based on however the newspaper sees its business model. The real trouble is that they don't really have detailed business models at the moment apart from putting ads on the pages. However if you don't sell all your ads, then more page views does not equal more money.
I wrote a comment yesterday about how the newspaper industry has lost most of an entire generation of readers due to the declining quality of their product. Now they are standing to lose all of that generation, and the next one coming, by making their content effectively inaccessible.
Like it or not, most people under 30 get their news from the internet. Some will read the occasional newspaper, or watch the TV, or listen to the radio, but the bottom line is that they are spending more time online than all three put together. They're going to look for information and news online before they look for it elsewhere.
People want one click news. Google news, while it isn't perfect, is providing them what they want. An easy way to get the latest headlines, and to search for news topics that interest them and that may not have recieved general coverage. Think about what the service is doing. It's combining the strengths of online, national and local news sources, all in one feed. As a reader of news online, I can safely say that well over 95% of the news stories I have read online were come by via the Google news service.
Newspapers, for some obscure reason, don't seem to like this. Instead they would prefer to make it harder to find their content, and ultimately harder to read it. Imagine an online business that demanded that Google and every other search engine stop indexing their content. It would be lunacy, yet that's exactly what these newspapers are doing.
There is a fundamental law to Internet business, if I may:
It doesn't matter how high quality your site's content is. If people cannot get past the barriers between them and it, they will turn to your competitors, one of whom will have information they can access quickly and conveniently. Time and again it has been shown that the more open and accessible a site is, the more traffic it will accumulate. True, there may not be much quality control on the traffic (Myspace, Gamespot, etc), but if your site is advertisement based, this will not matter a fiddlers to you.
So here is Google, doing newspapers a favour, by making their online content easier to acess and read, ultimately drawing more eyeballs to the ads on their story pages. And what do they do? They spit in Googles face and demand cold hard cash for every ten word story excerpt. It's lunacy. The product of minds either deranged or deluded. These people seem unable to grasp the consequences of their actions, unlike Google, who has understood the mechanics of all this from day one.
If the The Guardian manages to get its content delisted from Google news and other feeds, then the only effect will be that I, and millions of others, will no longer click into The Guardian website. It will be almost as if their site did not exist. And because people are moving to online over print news, these newspapers will lose an entire generation of not just online readers, but readers period. They are asking to drink hemlock, nay, demanding to do so.
I don't know who is running these newspapers. But whoever they are, they clearly do not actually understand how the newspaper industry actually work anymore. They seem to be like the bankers and economists in the financial industry, who knew so little about their businesses that they, against all reason, rationality and common sense, threw all their money, reputations and futures away for nothing. There is no logic to the decisions of management at these newspapers, yet they persist in this folly.
This probably points to some underlying pathology in the way western companies in general are run. They seem to be quite happy to lose every last one of their customers as long as they retain complete control over the dregs that remain.
May the Maths Be with you!
Newspapers pay for their news gathering mostly with advertising. The advertisers are deserting the newspapers for Google.
A couple of things make the problem worse. Most people just read the headlines and story summaries on a news agregator and seldom click through to the original story where they will see the newspaper's advertising. The people who do click through often aren't in the newspaper's geographic area. Even if they do see the newspaper's ads, they aren't in a position to be customers of the advertisers.
Whatever Google says, and even if what they are doing is completely legal, the 'common argument' is just deliberately ignoring the facts. When all the newspapers are out of business, there will be no news gathering and Google (and Huffington et al.) will have killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
When I find a news site that I like via google news I generally bookmark the rss and visit direct from there on out. I dont get what the problem is..
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Video from the people at Barely Political with a lot of truth to it i think ;) enjoy.
~ awaiting spiritual enlightenment ~
long ago. It has been at least a decade, possibly longer, since American newspapers decided to stop reporting and become repackagers of AP feeds. If you saw Google News when it first started, that fact was so glaringly, embarrassingly obvious that they took it down. That is, every single paper they were pulling from had the exact same articles, pulled from the AP, with perhaps a minor title change or slight change to the wording. The San Jose Mercury looked almost identical to the Boston Globe.
Then you have the abject failure of newspapers to investigate and confront at least two of the biggest disasters to occur in the past decade, the thin fabric of lies the Bush administration peddled to take the country into Iraq, and the financial collapse that we're currently suffering through. They merrily went along with the charade. The Grey Lady, the New York Times, for instance stood four-square behind its shill Judith Miller then, and still employs the hack Adam Nagourney whose spintastic gibberish would have gotten his ass insta-fired at the New York Times of 20 years ago.
And the final vestiges of editorial spine are snapping. George Will published blatant, factually incorrect statements in an op-ed of his last month that the Washington Post has yet to even address, much less issue a retraction for.
Newspapers therefore abandoned their core value proposition, to be sources of useful information, a long time ago because it was cheaper. It's just taken a while for citizens and readers to realize that and act accordingly.
So really, the Internet is only killing what was already dead. But increasingly major investigative style news is being broken by bloggers and citizen journalists, so there is a hope that online real reporting will live again.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Thats the thing. If they don't like it they can opt out at any time they want - there are plenty of technical fixes to solve this problem, so why are they resorting to lawyers?
Then block them. It's relatively simple, using the robots.txt file.
If you like, remove your RSS feeds and XML-based SEO site maps.
What's that? Your ad-hits have taken a massive decrease? Fancy that.
I used to read the Dallas Morning News. I started out when it was a quarter for the daily edition. Then, it went to 35 cents, then 50 cents. Then, they reduced the size, changed the fonts and layout to something I found hard to read, and raised the price to 75 cents. I quit buying the paper at that point. It was no longer worth the money. The last time I looked, it was up to a dollar a day, and two dollars on Sunday. Not an incentive to start reading again.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
If people are reading your content at Google News instead of at your site, what does it matter if you're pissing off readers ?
Sometimes it's better to just step out and cut your loses than to worry about whether you're pissing anyone off.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
1,500 newspapers all want to sue Google because it is now painfully obvious that all 1,500 papers in the country bought the same story from AP/UPI?
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Google is destroying the independence of newspapers by reducing the value of their content below what it costs to generate it. This opens the field to special interests - the "news" promoted by Rupert Murdoch, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the RIAA and all the other shills for one industry or another.
How can citizen journalists get the resources to investigate Government wrongdoing, or wrongdoing by large corporations?
Google is going to turn news into a combination of press releases and dog show reports. And this is part of its declared mission. Its mission is to deliver eyeballs to advertisements. Google does no evil - to its advertisers. But it will involve all other content into a race to the bottom, until the only real, hard news is once again, as it was for most of history, available only to an elite minority who were prepared to pay well for it.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Do it please!!! Tell Drudge to Comply too, and FT. and every other damn news aggregator service out there!!! Comply! When the AP, or any other news source starts DEMANDING that you pay them or take down their feeds and stories, do what they are asking you to do and FILTER OUT THEIR CONTENT FROM YOUR SEARCH RESPONSES!!! That way in a month or two when they start complaining that no one can find them on your sites, you play back the tape-recorded conversation between you and their frothing at the mouth lawyers, and say uh...no. When they come back and say, "uh, yeah about that silly "payment thing", we're sorry about that. We were high, and drunk and it was way too early in the morning to make a rational decision when our lawyers came up with that idea. Please take us back?" You say, "yeah, let me get back to you on that".....
Laugh about it for a week or two, and when the situation loses it's entertainment value for you...then remove the filters..... Problem solved...
-Oz
While the media groups have mentioned ultra-short summaries, that is not their real concern. If you are interested in a piece of news enough to want to read it, that little bit is not going to be enough to satisfy you, so you will click on the link, and read the article.
What the media groups want is for wither all news aggregators to cease to exist (thus people will come to their sites and browse them for the news) or for news aggregators to pay royalties.
They feel that they are unfairly loosing the advertising revenue of people browsing the news on their site. (Since if you are browsing on the site you will likely stay on the site longer, so more advertising revenue.) With news aggregators, even just those with headline links, the browsing occurs off-site, and they only get the advertising revenue for the articles themselves. They would have just as much issue with Google if it were headlines only, but they would be more hesitant to complain, as they would appear to have much less of a valid complaint.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
*THAT'LL SHOW 'EM!*
Oh wait, then Google News wouldn't have any content and no one would end up going to Google News anymore. Hrm...
creation science book
I'm tired of the BS in ALL of the electronic and print media. The over simplification of issues, the half truths, and in some cases, I've caught downright falsehoods. Some of the local papers and media are becoming more and more opinionated. They're not just stating the facts - they're throwing in opinion. I have my own opinions - thank-you-very-much - and I refuse to spend my time reading some other person's. A person who has to write something, not to show the truth, but to write something that's sensational to get readers or viewers or listeners.
Oh, and let me add something. There is NO SUCH THING AS THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA and the rest. They are ALL "mainstream media". Those folks who bitch about the "mainstream media" work for the mainstream media themselves; which makes them bullshitters.
For anyone that hasn't read it, here is a great indictment of the idiocy of the newspapers, written by the lead writer for SearchEngineLand: http://daggle.com/090406-225638.html
What you're saying makes perfect sense, however if there is a demand for real information, odds are something will replace newspapers for investigative reporting.
There are currently some (albeit extreme) sites that could almost qualify as replacing newspapers, such as AlterNet which runs on a donation model. Although a lot of their content does point to other sites, they do write their own material.
Furthermore, don't underestimate the power of bloggers in today's society. For local investigative reporting, small-time bloggers could potentially take the place of newspapers.
Now, for large investigative journalism projects like war journalism, I can't think of an easy solution, but maybe someone can?
But I can say I get a lot of my daily news from my RSS ticker and Google's general news feed is my main source. If companies pulled themselves from that source I simply wouldn't read their stuff. I wouldn't click on ads on their site. I wouldn't have anything to do with them and they'd loose out in the long-run. I don't think I'm the only one who gets their news this way, and in fact I'm pretty sure as time goes on more people will be doing this. Business models are changing, adaptation is key to survival.
I'm a small-town newspaper editor. I'm feeling the pain, though not nearly as bad as most papers are. We're independent, so we actually have to run as a business and not as an overleveraged financial con game, the way so many large news chains are these days. This turns out to mean that we weather the storm far better than the big guys.
The Associated Press' recent saber-rattling in Google's direction is, I believe, nothing more than some moguls' desperate attempt to wring some cash out of some successful Internet companies on their way out the door. The fact is that there was always a five-minute remedy to the supposed wrongs done to them -- robots.txt -- will probably devastate their case. But who knows? Maybe they figure they can get some go-away money. The legal system doesn't always go the way you might expect it to.
That said, Schmidt's idea that newspapers should live in fear of "pissing off" readers is fatuous and lame, and exactly wrong. Sure, this should be the case when it comes to usability -- by all means, get the info in front of eyeballs any way you can, and with the absolute minimum amount of pain on the user's end. That should be everyone's goal.
But then there's content, and here it is absolutely essential to risk pissing off your readers with every issue. The news people need to hear -- the news that it's important for them to hear -- is bad news. The fact that you print bad news is going to inevitably piss people off. Maybe a lot of people. You want news that pisses no one off? You're asking for a Chamber of Commerce newsletter, not a newspaper. And look how well read those are.
This story became pretty popular very quickly. What do you think their numbers look like now? I bet they're 15% higher due to the fuss they are making. Regardless of the outcome, they have gained more viewers through their sneaky-like tactics.
Clearly it isn't option 1). I'm sure their server logs tell them what percentage of their traffic comes from Google. They want their cake and eat it: ie to be paid by Google for the privilege of sending traffic their way.
Just announced that dailies will increase to $1.00 and the Sunday paper to $3.00. I think they've already pissed off their readers.
The issue here is more of a financial business model rather than a fight over content. I go to Google because I like the format and I get a variety news from various sources. The funding model is advertising from an increasing market.
I listen to NPR in my car and watch the PBS news at home. The funding model is guilt driven subscriptions from a loyal audience.
I don't read print newspapers as they generate too much waste. The online sites for the Boston Globe, boston.com, and the New York Times suck. The funding model is advertising and subscription from a diminishing readership.
I trust that in the slim chance news agencies manage to win their cases in court, Google will figure a way to continue to deliver me the news.
The newspapers here are obviously being given a choice between:
A) Google aggregates/indexes their content, shows snippets and images and links to them
B) They opt-out using robots.txt or metatags and no longer appear in Google News
What the whiners really want is:
C) Google aggregates/indexes their content, shows snippets and images and links to them AND PAYS THEM
But since they don't want to come right out and say that, they bitch and moan about copyright and monopolies and aliens and whatever else they can think of.
I think this could easily be solved if Google called their bluff. When each entity gets whiny and preachy and targets Google with these types of stories, Google should ask them if they'd like to be removed... Yes or No. If they refuse to choose yes or no, Google dumps them. Within a week, their traffic will drop so much that they'll be begging Google to be back in.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Google in particular just offers links, with no ads. The frikking links have to say *something*. Some content they pay for themselves, the rest, just links. Google in essence is a big glorified phone directory, except for the tubes. Guess what newspaper idjits, the shoe is on the other foot, you have to pay big bucks to get good "coverage" in the yellow pages. Google should follow that precedent and *charge them for indexing them*, no pay, no coverage. And if it gets real rough for google, they have enough cash to start their own global news collecting network, enough cash and infrastructure, using both hired ande volunteer reporters, that they could blow AP and the others out of the water. I hope google doesn't cave in and fights them over this. And screw murdoch, he is a planetary leech anyway, a scumbag.
If newspapers die, so does reporting
This comes from an article at salon.com http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/02/17/newspapers/ , but I've heard it a number of times, most recently on CBC Radio. Turns out that every other media gets most of their copy off the wire news services, and, on radio for example, reads it straight off the sheet. There's a funky name for it in the business that slips my mind right now.
Now, I've got my own beefs with the quality of reporting such as it exists today, but if you think it is bad now, what happens when newspapers go down the toilet? Does that just leave us with journalism by press release? Or, yegads, bloggers as our primary source.
It seems to me that newspapers still add value in terms of content, but their distribution model has died and they haven't figured out how to get revenue out of on-line services. So what if google is sending eyeballs their way, if there isn't enough money to be made in the paper's on-line ads?
Is it the case that the only people making real money out of on-line ads is google? If so, how long will that model work for google - it sounds like a long term loser, if all google's customers aren't making money off of what google is selling them?
I have some empathy for the papers here - google is another goddamned distributer getting rich off of content providers, no?
Grist for the mill - I'm not intending to troll here.
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
This isn't much different than the "must-carry" cable legislation of days past...
Local TV stations wanted to force cable operators to pay to carry their stations, but the cable operators wanted some of the local TV stations, didn't want to pay for all the local TV stations. Of course the small unpopular channels felt they would get left out of the cable operators lineups if cable could choose.
Thus was born the "must-carry" legislation where local TV stations could opt-in to "must-carry" (where the cable operators didn't have to pay, but were forced to carry), or "retransmition-consent" (where local TV stations could negotiate for carriage, but the cable operators weren't forced to carry). Thus the popular local TV stations could get paid for their content, but the small unpopular channels wouldn't get a free ride. In the end, though, I think almost all local TV stations elected "must-carry" and cable was pretty much forced by the legislation to carry just about any TV station that put up a broadcast antenna.
I can see it all coming down to similar legislation in the end if there isn't an agreement. Google better be prepared to be indexing a million left-wing/right-wing/wacko news rags and blogs and updating continuously (they currently claim 25,000 news souces) if they want to continue down this road. Because if most of the small rags elect "must-carry", there will be lots of squeaking wheels to grease if they don't get their 15 minutes of fame....
So they would like rather let the reader read what they want to read rather than tell the truth? Dumb!
AP: Hello we are on course to collide with you.
Google: Well change your course.
AP: We are the AP you must redirect your ad revenue.
Google: We can not do that. You must adapt.
AP: We say again this is the almighty AP you must pay us or perish.
Google: We are a lighthouse, your call.
The readers are not the customers, they are the product. The advertisers are the customers. The advertisers want to purchase people's attention, and so the newspapers need to have people's attention so that they can sell it to their customers. The paper itself and its news stories are just their means of "manufacturing" their product.
You should take your other colleagues in the online version and just walk away and start your own news company then. Eliminate the upper management skim, more cash for you guys, less headaches. And stay private, don't get involved with outside investors, then you can stay focused.
All these big corporations are so fond of slashing "overhead" by outsourcing or firing good people, screw them, outsource yourself to working for yourself, eliminate that big fat overhead expense of layers of PHBs and short term profits fixated "investors".
IMHO, it's all about how and why you piss people off. There's a difference between pissing people off by doing your job (printing real news), and pissing people off by NOT doing your job (printing "news" about Paris/Britteny/OJ and ignoring the financial collapse). All too often, I see the later, and those news organizations might as well FOAD.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
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then don't let a search engine in.
You've lost the views from them but then you've just said they don't pay enough.
AP is behaving like the record labels - in the face falling sales and file sharing, what do they do? Demand that Apple, the #1 seller of their products, jack up their prices. AP should be THANKING Google for directing readers to sites bearing AP's content. Google should call their bluff and send all those online advertising dollars towards the BBC and Reuters for a while.
That said, Schmidt's idea that newspapers should live in fear of "pissing off" readers is fatuous and lame, and exactly wrong.
How so? Who wants to pay extra for news in 2009? Look at the NYT, they dropped their "Times Select" membership service after they realized they made more money from advertising than from the few people willing to pay for their opinion page and back stories.
... you won't like us when we're angry.
[signature]
You've even said one reason yourself (though you seem to have missed it): they all get from AP. AP is being paid by Google.
So there's no problem there.
Other newspapers don't research, so there will be no loss in news research by their passing.
Another one is the partisanship.
Just stop aggregating and delist newspapers that complain from the entire index.
When they see their page hits drop off and kill the only viable market that they can use to survive, they will come back crying.
Then charge them to be relisted.
Fine, drop them off Google altogether and lets see how their business does then...
If you want to fight Google and don't like your stuff on their site, just tell them. They'll just take it down. In fact you don't even have to tell this company notorious for not letting you ever reach a live person with a question or problem. ROBOTS.TXT.
Of course you lose completely since Google pwns the information highway.
So instead, for content your otherwise giving away for free on your own sites you now want to dictate the rules for Google. You Must Carry Our News and You Must Pay Us Any Fee We Demand For Doing So!
Is this still America? Or did all the Hope and Change suddenly put me in Europe -- or worse?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Tell me about it. I want to tell them, "Yeah, and I programmed my word processor to print out my essay." But then they probably wouldn't know what a word processor was.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
The newspapers need to get together with someone like Epson or HP, and establish standards for printing customized newspapers on the premise.
The little bit of value left in physical papers is the format, the style, and the physical copy. Even the web and e-readers are no replacement for a physical paper. A single column 8.5 x 11 print out on copier paper is no substitute either.
Instead the papers joust with the web? Yeah, good luck with that.
How much nroff and device independent code can it take to generate a nice paper for me each day?
They have a link to "Associated Press" under several of the articles, which brings me to pages with the stories hosted by Google.
Rupert Murdoch (CEO of News Corp, and to that extend the New York Post, Fox News Channel, and MySpace) is sharpening his "Liberal Outrage" skills against The Internet, primarily web portals such as Google, news sites such as The Huffington Post, and message boards such as 4chan. It is no surprise to the Internet who has known Murdoch's plan has been in the works for about a few years now with each attempt being more disasterous to News Corp than the last.
Having run out of good scapegoats to promote his urine-flavored yellow journalism and far-right agenda, Murdoch is hoping that by causing disinformation about Google's services, he can create the image that the Internet is a malicious place that is destroying the newspaper industry.
Murdoch's plans, like all those previous, are not well thought out. With every attempt to use a single voice to create disdain, there are several voices that are much larger on the Internet that can crack the Fox News Corp Spin.
Prepare for another round of Rupert Murdoch's Witchhunt where the witchhunters set themselves on fire.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
When you install it you need to select that feature in the options window. I generally turn off the add more sites feature, but the filter feature is worth its weight in gold!
--bornagainpenguin
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They have a way to easily deny Google their content.
They say they want payment for their content.
Google says no.
They choose to still have their content on Google.
They say they want payment for their content.
WTF?
That's a name of a French language Belgian newspaper.
They sued Google in Belgium, because of google news! And they actually won.
Result: google remove them from the news aggregator and and and... the search engine!
Awesome :)