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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.
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.
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?
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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.
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.
Google isn't pulling people away - people are actively seeking news aggregators and Google happens to be one of the best. People just like to use aggregators when looking for anything, be it news, small ads, auctions, whatever. With eBay it makes it easy to find the best deal, with news it makes it easy to find more details or to get a more balanced view by comparing what different sites report.
If the newspapers wanted to they could provide their own news aggregator, showing news stories from other newspapers next to their own, and as a dedicated news site they could probably do a better job than Google. They just haven't grasped that it would work in their favour.
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.
Meanwhile, the access to real information, which helps keep society free, dies off.
The Internet has done more for freedom in society than any other single force.
Newspapers are indeed the only people employing reporters currently. Although journalism will not die, newspapers certainly will if they continue to willfully avert their eyes from the writing on the wall. We don't know what the outcome of this upheaval will be. But I'm pretty sure blaming Google and calling Schmidt names isn't a way to resolve it. I will once again point to Clay Shirky's article on the subject: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
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!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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?
Pulling them away? Are you completly uniformed about the way it works?
I check m y news entirely through the google news site. *EVERY* single time I read an article
it takes me to the website.
Without google, the page hits from me and thousands of other users would never appear.
I agree with an ealier suggestion. Fine, lets have google go down the list and just stop aggregating their news.
Let their add revenue drop even further as page hits drop. Then when they want to be included again *CHARGE* them for it.
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."
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
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.
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.
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
This is just wishful thinking to assume that random people will be less biased, although you might be able to argue that they will be biased in different ways ... but that's not the same thing, and it's not necessarily better.
I think this is missing some info. too, both newspapers and movies have had monopolies on production and distribution. And as long as you aren't talking about digital distribution, both still do. The problem is that newspapers have crossed the point where digital distribution is often better and physical distribution, so all they have is the production monopoly ... and they've been canibalizing their production budgets to keep their physical distribution monopolies going.
With TiVO, netflix, PSN and YouTube all trying to push digital distribution of movies/TV we are going to get to the crossing point soon (but, not there yet, IMO) where buying/renting DVDs isn't the "best" distribution anymore. I'd hope/assume the movie studios won't react by firing 90% of their actors/directors/etc. ... but you never know.
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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".
you'd be more likely (if not all but forced) to visit the front pages of newspaper sites to get your news
Actually, I'm not very likely to do that. If it's not on CNN.COM, Time.com, Newsweek.com or other national/global sites, I'm just as likely to give up. I'm not going to start trolling through paper after paper (each one a walled garden of information) looking for content. I'm even less likely to pay a subscription fee to do so. In other words, I think the argument that 'if people can't use aggregators they'll come to us' is wishful thinking, when the third possibility is that the papers just drop off the radar entirely.
It doesn't help that the place where the papers should have the greatest strength, local news, has been a disappointment for me in the past. When something interesting happens today, I'd like to see it on the local newspaper web site -today-. Rarely happens. Newspapers seem to act as if stories don't need to be on the web until they're actually printed on dead trees first. If I'm lucky it will be posted tomorrow. If I'm not lucky it won't be posted at all since the public site has only a small subset of the newspaper's content. If it is posted eventually, I have the added aggravation of having to hunt it down quickly, because it's going to drop into the 'walled garden' in just a few days.
By the way, the papers might be including aggregators that provide nothing but links in their complaint, but I think their only hope is to focus on the ones like Google News that also provide 'fair use' snippets of the articles. Getting the snippets to stop might be the 'right' outcome anyway. I suspect that some papers -are- losing page views because people read the snippet and decide they've seen enough and don't need to click through. I'm pro fair use but I still want to see content creators survive and get paid.
The newspapers have no chance as far as I am concerned to convince a court that they should be paid just for linking. This is what I meant by 'the genie is out of the bottle'. So yes, I am saying that aggregation of some sort will be legal indefinitely. But I also believe, that if I'm wrong and the papers get their way, they've just killed themselves so much the faster, if my behavior is typical of the public at large.
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