Slashdot Mirror
Newspapers Face the Prisoner's Dilemma With Google
Hugh Pickens writes "Nicholas Carr has an interesting analysis of Rupert Murdoch's threat to de-list News Corp's stories from Google and Microsoft's eager offer to make Bing Murdoch's exclusive search engine for its content. Carr writes that newspapers are caught in a classic Prisoner's Dilemma with Google because Google's search engine 'prevents them from making decent money online — by massively fragmenting traffic, by undermining brand power, and by turning news stories into fungible commodities.' If any single newspaper opts out of Google, their competitors will pick up the traffic they lose. There is only one way that newspapers can break out of the prison — if a critical mass of newspapers opt out of Google's search engine simultaneously, they would suddenly gain substantial market power. Murdoch may have been signaling to other newspapers that 'we'll opt out if you'll opt out,' positioning himself as the would-be ringleader of a massive jailbreak, without actually risking a jailbreak himself. There are signs that Murdoch's signal is working, with reports that the publishers of the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News are now also considering blocking Google. In the meantime, Steve Ballmer is more than happy to play along with Murdoch because although a deal with News Corps would reduce the basic profitability of Microsoft's search business, it would inflict far more damage on Google than on Microsoft."
When it comes to Google and other aggregators, newspapers face a sort of prisoners' dilemma. If one of them escapes, their competitors will pick up the traffic they lose. But if all of them stay, none of them will ever get enough traffic to make sufficient money. So they all stay in the prison, occasionally yelling insults at their jailer through the bars on the door.
So ... the original prisoner's dilemma (if I recally my AI coursework) was basically comes down to two or more prisoner's arrested as suspects in a crime. They are immediately separated into different interrogation rooms. The police officers use every trick they can to get any of the prisoners to lay claim to committing the crime and receive a plea bargain if they testify against the other suspects. If no one caves, then everyone walks. Now, the important thing to note here is that if one suspect caves and the other n-1 suspects don't, then that suspect receives a sub-optimal reward of a lighter sentence while those that did not own up to the crime receive very harsh penalties. And so you have a dilemma ... did one of your crew rat you out already? Should you take the guaranteed three months in prison versus a potential ten years?
... but the most important problem is that no one knows if the current situation is a suboptimal goal or optimal goal. And no one's going to find out until they leave Google. If a single newspaper leaves Google, they ruin it for themselves (unlike the prisoner's dilemma) and no one else. In fact, the others might even benefit from that.
The important thing is that one rogue actor could ruin it for everyone.
So the analogy seems to imply that newspapers have taken a suboptimal goal (being in jail)
What this is a closer analogy to is the MLB strike you may (or may not care about) remember. Basically the baseball players didn't think they were making enough bank so they went on strike. If anyone of them said, "Screw it, I'm leaving the league, I'm going to literally take my bat and ball and go elsewhere," then they would have been broke. But the whole league went on strike, they could have formed a new league, they could have went to a different league, they could have entered talks with the European league to open leagues in the US, etc.
The newspapers should continue to court Microsoft and play the two search leaders off against each other. Also, I'm no robots.txt expert but I think there is a disallow from certain domains syntax they can use to block Google, Microsoft or white list one of the two. Another strategy might be to go on strike and have all newspapers request to be removed from Google for one week. Let the system break down and then enter negotiations with the giant.
One thing is pretty clear, they must unionize/unify and act as a single entity in either leaving or negotiating. And I don't really see that happening. They might be able to negotiate between Microsoft and Google on a case by case basis but Google is still too much larger than Bing to do that.
My work here is dung.
...my mainstream media free google news search hits. Let me support some motivated, independent amateur investigative reporters... I have had waay enough of the corporate parrot news line for the self-proclaimed "professionals".
Maybe, just maybe, consumers who value actual news over sensationalized claptrap are finding that the opinion pieces and "human interest" stories which dominate Murdoch's offerings are fungible commodities.
Good bye Wall Street Journal. You were a reputable publication at one time.
I don't think Google will care in the slightest if all the newspapers removed themselves from its index. There are still plenty of online only news sites, specialist media sites and so on that Google can point to. If people know they want to read one of Rupert Murdoch's offerings, they would go there direct, not via Google, and most Google customers aren't going to go to Yahoo or Bing to compare the search results they get.
Will the BBC join? No! So international news is hopeless. Do people care about local news?
What if google endowed a nonprofit news organization? Or just bought wikinews the rights to use AP feeds?
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
This is the key issue, "few people want to use them for news". The way for newspapers to survive is to stop trying to provide up-to-the-minute news and concentrate on in-depth, reliable reporting. Newspapers are idea for covering local issues that do not get the attention of big media. They are also ideal for sports news and providing a forum for informed debate. The big strength of a newspaper is that there is a gate-keeper to prevent rubbish from being published. If newspapers can take advantage of that they can not only survive, but prosper. If newspapers simply try to out-internet the internet they are doomed.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Neither one of these has anything to do with Google, however surviving Google (or it's replacement) requires doing one and or the other. The fact that Google is the delivery mechanism for much of their traffic is moot. Changing the delivery mechanism won't change the fundamentals behind the issue. What newspapers need to do is learn how to keep the traffic they get once visitors find their site.
Google already licenses the AP feeds. Click any AP story and you go to the Google-hosted AP text.
This is why this scheme is NEVER going to work. Google already licenses AP, which creates 75% of the content in all these papers anyway. Also there are many major international players, like the NPR and BBC and CBC, that will never opt out of Google, as they are not-for-profits in the first place.
The end result is everyone will get their local news from NPR/CBC/BBC, and all these newspapers will just go under FASTER.
No one will pay for news online. Give it up.