Slashdot Mirror
Brazilian Newspapers Leave Google News En Masse
Dupple writes "In light of the recent story regarding Google threatening a French media ban after France proposed that search engines should pay for content, it seems a similar thing is happening in Brazil, with numerous papers leaving Google News. The controversy fueled one of the most intense debates during the Inter American Press Association's 68th General Assembly, which took place from Oct. 12 to 16 in São Paulo. On one side of the debate were defenders of news companies' authoring rights, like German attorney Felix Stang, who said, 'platforms like Google's compete directly with newspapers and magazines because they work like home pages and use content from them.' On the other, Google representatives said their platform provides a way to make journalistic content available to more people. According to Marcel Leonardi, the company's public policies director, Google News channels a billion clicks to news sites around the world."
They'll see what happens when their visits drop. People can't be expected to remember every paper that there is and go to each individual site when attempting to find a specific story. This will only be to the papers' detriment.
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
How many is a brazilian?!
Rupert Murdoch blasted Google in the past for featuring his news sites and had them removed. Yet recently, he reversed his decision: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/9566353/Rupert-Murdoch-backs-down-in-war-with-parasite-Google.html
I use the favorites button on my browser, so I don't have to remember anything. If I want to be bold, I can open up the home pages of all my news sites at once.
An outlier like myself means nothing to these corporations, OTOH, and hardly anybody seems willfully informed by the web anyway.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Robots.txt. You can prohibit google or any reputable search engine from indexing your content.
The POINT of the HTTP protocol is to serve data, but if you don't wanna, it's your machine that gives the data over. It doesn't have to do that. You have full control over that via several different means, from robots.txt to a paywall. There are blacklists and whitelists - what gets given out is under the control of the serving system. It seems a bit insane to voluntarily reply to a request for data, and then get mad that the other side saw the data. If you don't want them to see it, don't offer it up via a protocol whose entire purpose is to transfer data from a server to a requesting machine.
The internet could never have grown as it did if in the beginning everyone was going to subvert the intent of the technical aspects of it.
According to Marcel Leonardi, the company's public policies director, Google News channels a billion clicks to news sites around the world.
Let me know when you can channel a brazillion clicks to news sites, then we'll talk.
Google is clearly in the right - it would break the internet if you couldn't link to articles on another site. That being said, the newspapers are correct in that they are losing traffic to their homepage - people are less likely than ever to bother checking cnn.com vs going directly to google news. What the newspapers fail to see is:
1. They gain far more traffic to article pages than they lose from their homepage.
2. Their homepages are not as inviting as google's - learn from that. Figure out why. Is it just choice, or is there more to it?
3. If they succeed, then sites that currently link to articles and drive traffic - not just google - would delist them. All that traffic coming from reddit, buzzfeed, blogspot, wordpress, facebook, twitter, etc - GONE.
The only way to see the newspaper's side is if you imagine someone make a faux cnn homepage - listing only cnn articles and putting up advertising. That would seem fishy, wouldn't it? But to make that side count - to give it the same weight as google's, you'd need to discount that google is a search engine, displays multiple pages, and gives far more than it takes. You'd need to ignore that enforcement only becomes possible if you end up hurting more than just google - and the impact that would have on the web would be devastating.
1. New media sites that were born and bred online will fill in most of the gap.
2. Bloggers who quote the MSM will fill in the rest and be the main venue by which these papers even get back into Google in some capacity.
The newspapers believe that they have a right to force me to pay for telling someone else that their paper carries a story and what page it's on? I... can't think of a single bit of law supporting that position, anywhere. They certainly have the right to keep me from photocopying their story and handing it out to people, but "the right to be the only entity who can tell others the work exists" isn't something I find anywhere in copyright law.
Maybe this will prompt someone to come up with a better way to collect and distribute the news to people without charge. We should not need to pay to find out what is going on in the world around us.
look at this article:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57535804/confrontation-may-loom-in-waters-off-israel/
and check how many American news sites report on it via Google:
http://www.google.com/news?q=Ship+to+Gaza+Estelle&lr=English&hl=en
Very very few. So, maybe the Brazilian news sites have something to hide? Filtered news is this news?
That's not the reason to let them. If they block Google, then that is their right. At least they're not demanding Google pay to link.
Block Google, enter a robots.txt, make ignoring robots.txt a copyright offence, whatever.
They're entitled to do so.
They're not entitled to rework the entire internet because they don't like how it operates.
Google provides FREE news search feature to consumers, funds and profits from it via ads on search page.
Newspaper gets worldwide exposure which drives (increases) existing ad revenue/views
News companies should be elated about this service, they are basically getting exposure and increased revenue from google's search product without having to pay Google a dime.
Since any site has the ability to prevent to be indexed by means of a simple robots.txt, the request to ban Google from indexing news sites changes its meaning. The news sites are not asking: "please stop indexing our site" but: "please stop indexing the sites of our competitors" by outlawing it.
My karma ran over your dogma
Or have you never been on there?
NO ADVERTS.
Google *Search* has adverts. Google *News* doesn't.
So shutting down Google News will not lose ANY clicking on placed ads.
Idiot.
If you don't like it then stop whining and pull yourselves from google. You have the power don't pretend you don't or don't know that you do.
What is the point of whining when a few lines added to a single text file will solve *all* of your problems?
I don't think so
I suppose Slashdot should pay someone for bringing us this story then?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Should google news become opt-in, all the (crappy) sources not willing to evolve from their old dying business will just disappear from there. I am sure there will be plenty of other (probably more) interesting stuff willing to take a share of the visibility.
And how did you initially find all these favorite news sites?
My bet would be something like what happened with me. I click on stories from a few news sites through news.google.com and find myself returning to these sites enough that I eventually just bookmark them.
Maybe Google figured out that for you it makes you more likely to click through if they show you right wing headlines?
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
The entire news business is having trouble because their previous position as the gatekeepers to news is and will now always be lost to them. More or less every rule and instinct they have learned during their careers is now out of sync with the reality of how the Internet works. They aren't bad, they just don't understand the way forward. That is why they wrongly attack the search engines, they understand their gatekeeper position is lost, but they don't really know how to cope yet. To an extent search engines really are the successors to a newspaper. A newspaper was an attempt to put information "valuable" to the public in a form that could be distributed. Because of time and paper limitations it was necessary for actual people to make decisions about the best way to distribute this information.
But today, any entity or person, business or private, can now easily communicate directly to the public in a way they choose. We don't really need reporters to tell us "today the President’s spokesman said..." when we can read it ourselves online on www.whitehouse.gov. The public is now in control of what information they want to learn more about AND everyone now has an option of providing their own story in their own words (biased or not!). This did not exist before in any practical or sensible way, other than in "small towns" where everyone knew everyone's business anyway.
There is, and will probably always be, a need for ethically trained people to attempt to disentangle truth from fiction. For example the moderator at the second presidential debate and fact checking sites are the most simple examples. I am afraid I don’t have the answers, but I know why we can’t go back.
And any paper that doesn't want to be indexed can tell Google "Pay us money or we'll block your spider." So why do the papers need laws requiring Google to pay them when they already have the means at hand to require payment themselves?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Consider why google runs news.google.com. It can't be ad revenue from the site, because that particular google site has no ads.
Answer lies in core function of google's official mission - to index everything as recognisably as possible and sell this information in various forms to its clientele. In this case, they get detailed information on what news its main product follows and how. This will often let them build a very good personal profile on many subjects that its customers would be interested in, such as political orientation and strength of conviction in such orientation, sexual orientation, religion and so on.
Seriously, stop and think for a moment what kind of profile can be built on a person based just on their news.google.com preferences and clickthrough. Now consider that google has unified its recognition algorithms to use all its platforms. You could make a very solid argument that google is basically leveraging its monopoly to collect this data for free, repackage it, and resell it without paying a dime to original producers.
Of course, you could also make a very solid argument against this as well. As I said in the other article about french press, both sides have very compelling arguments to back their cause. To pretend that only the side you support has them and other doesn't is quite ignorant at this point.
Problem 1) There are too many newspapers competing with the same story for the same eyeballs. You wind up with 50 stories being written about the same event. Google shows the best headline and blurb and then 5 links below it. Many of the clicks go to blogs and not newspapers.
Problem 2) An ad shown in search results is worth more than an ad shown on a newspaper's home page. If I search for cars in google news then I may be interested in buying a car. If I click through to a newpaper article about cars then I am probably not in the market for a car. I am likely looking for news. So Google gets more money out of its ads than the newspapers do.
Here is what is really going to happen.
The people the News agencies are worried about are already coming through Google news.
They will continue to look at Google News and not even notice that the results of the stuff they are looking for do not have Brazilian newspapers in them.
They will just see links to places that have the content they are looking for and they will go there.
Most of the internet cows will not even notice that Brazilian News organizations are no longer relevant to the larger conversations going on without them.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
"Brazilian Newspapers Leave Google En Masse"
"What Brazilian Newspapers?"
"Exactly."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
and post the articles on Google news. Except for local news most newspapers recycle the same fucking articles. You got 100's of site around the globe posting the same thing. Google should just pay for it, post it and put up ads and let the papers rot away.
What's really amazing is how the papers have had time since what 1999/2000 to figure out new business plans to include the internet and none of these people could figure out what to do?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
or the lack there of you will see after the exodus.
>>>
That's basically what Google does already: just puts headlines and 1-2 sentences from the start, with a link to TFA. The newspapers don't even want that much.
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Not entirely correct. They do not mind Google doing all the indexing chore and responding to users in a fraction of a second. But they have noticed that Google earns billions from this service and so they neither mind squeezing some of the juice off. Generously.
What they really dislike is telling you the truth, they have a strong preference for intellectual property verbiage. They are being robbed, you know.
So there you go.
These guys are shooting their own feet off
First the left and then the right, some do it the other way around.
Google should remove them ASAP and charge them a fee to re-index them...
Fifty times too many news sites.
I come here for the love
Seriously. I am sick of that shit every time to randomly go to a news website, forum or aggregator. I do not give a fuck about your android app.
There seems to be endless gnashing of teeth over this issue. How about we just let the market, e.g., you and I along with everyone else decide? Let papers opt out and Google just stops placing their articles on their news page. If readership and revenues drop, the papers always have the option to come back. If not, then they don't. I've always struggle with the papers' position. Google introduces their articles to a lot of people. Google gets something in return. If publishers don't like that arrangement, then there are solutions. I'm a missing something?
Man oh man, those wacky newspapers are at it again, doing their newspaper thing. Wow, somebody should newspaper them!
Ok... what's a newspaper exactly?
Agree on all points. Google gains large amounts of personal data on its users from news.google.com. That is its core business. It obviously doesn't want to lose it, but it also doesn't want to pay for it either.
In the end, this will be an interesting precedent regardless of outcome. Both parties will have very good arguments to bring to the table.
Years and years ago, it was considered that one day we would have a convenient and efficient way to make micro-payments on line. Didn't William Gibson's novels foresee such a world? Anyhow, suppose news articles had a real "Like" button, not the Facebook Like. If you liked the story, you could click this button and give it a voluntary micro-payement of from a fraction of a cent to a few cents or as high as you wish. From time to time I have seen some excellent articles by some of the best professional journalists in the world that had a profound impact on my consciousness. In these cases, if there was a simple way as desribed above to show my appreciation I would certainly donate.
People don't read newspapers, people read "news". And Google is the Gateway to "news".
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Google drives so many clicks that newspapers should be paying Google, not the other way around. However, since they are taking this road, if I were Google I would stop indexing them and then start charging for those that leave. If you want back in, pay per click so you'll learn your lesson.
Another example of Old Media shooting itself in the foot. Picture dinosaurs looking at the bright light in the sky.