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Brazilian Newspapers Leave Google News En Masse

Posted by Soulskill on from the taking-their-toys-and-going-home dept.

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."

13 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Let them by jeffy210 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    ------
    "And may your days be long upon the earth."
    1. Re:Let them by verbatim · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yep. Google doesn't show the entire article, they show enough content to drive viewers to the article. It's up to the individual sites to retain those visitors, not Google.

      Newspapers should be paying Google for the service of indexing and driving customers to them.

      --
      Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
    2. Re:Let them by Baloroth · · Score: 4, Informative

      Why don't they just put headlines and first paragraphs on one page and set robots.txt to allow search engines to index it, then put the full articles on a different page with indexing not allowed. Google's crawler would get the headline and synopsis and the papers would get advertising from everyone who was interested enough to read more than a few sentences.

      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.

      --
      "None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
    3. Re:Let them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Why don't they just put headlines and first paragraphs on one page....

      Have you actually *been* to news.google.com ??? Didn't think so.

      Google News is nothing more than an aggregator for news sites. They provide headline and first sentence and a link to the actual news site.

      What the news sites are bitching about is people go to google to look at what is happening instead of their main pages. News sites provide the food but they don't make the menu anymore and that is the problem.

    4. Re:Let them by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      I suspect that, just as everyone is above average and thinks that their children are atypically cute, all the newspapers harbor the dream that they will beat the odds and get to be a 'Portal' for all those precious consumer eyeballs, just like Yahoo or AOL sometime before the turn of the millennium, rather than bleeding subscribers or contributing a sentence or two of scrapings to people's search results...

    5. Re:Let them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      They should start paying website owners and creators too. If we didn't make websites, they would have nothing to link in their main search either. It is not like there is some mutual relationship that benefits both otherwise...

    6. Re:Let them by MBGMorden · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Particularly when you boil the situation down to the most basic premise - people are still visiting their site. They're literally made at Google for making it too easy for people to find what they actually WANT from that site. They want the users to have to wade through their own poor interface for a given amount of time - seeing their ads - before they finally find the content.

      Forcing your customers into a more difficult path for your own benefit with no incentive to them will not work well. Never has, never will.

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
    7. Re:Let them by dsvick · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Aggregate sites do drive viewers to articles, but it may be that they are driving them in a way that is not profitable for the news sites themselves.

      That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, there is no difference between one person staying on the site and viewing 10 pages vs 10 separate people viewing a single page each. I'd even be willing to bet that the news sites get more out of it than google does. When I go to google news I usually hit the page one time, scroll through it and click on whatever articles interest me. Those sites all open in another tab/window, the google news page doesn't change or refresh so I'm only giving them a single hit, while the news sites are all getting one. I don't see the inequity.

      I'm of the opinion that the vast majority of news articles are pretty much the same across news sites anyway and I really don't care (too much) where I'm reading it from, so I don't go out of my way to remember any specific ones. If they are at the top of the pile on google, well then, they're the one that gets clicked. and if they aren't listed, they'll never get my click. If it weren't for google I wouldn't even know they existed, I'd end up at some small number news sites that I could remember and found reasonably unbiased, odds are it would be one of the big name sites, or more than one just to add a little balance. While that is great for the foxnews and cnns of the world, it is not so good for eastNowhereActionnews. But, hey, if they want to go it without google, more power to them, there are probably a couple of dozen people there that know their url and will visit it.

    8. Re:Let them by matrim99 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The "problem" is shifting useage patterns. The solution is to shift the business model accordingly. Blaming Google on user's constantly changing behavior is easier than adjusting a business model.

      --
      Right. No, your other right. No, the other other right.
  2. My god! by grnbrg · · Score: 5, Funny

    How many is a brazilian?!

    1. Re:My god! by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 4, Funny

      Think of it as a multiple of Library of Congress stuffed with Kim Kardashian's butt cheeks . . .

      --
      Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
  3. News Corp already tried this and failed. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  4. They'd lose no revenue. No ads on google news. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.