Slashdot Log In
Google CEO Warns Newspapers Not To Anger Readers
Posted by
Soulskill
on Wed Apr 08, 2009 08:54 AM
from the hand-that-feeds dept.
from the hand-that-feeds dept.
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.
Related Stories
[+]
Should Google Be Forced To Pay For News? 322 comments
Barence writes "The Guardian Media group is asking the British government to investigate Google News and other aggregators, claiming they reap the benefit of content from news sites without contributing anything towards their costs. The Guardian claims the old argument that 'search engines and aggregators provide players like guardian.co.uk with traffic in return for the use of our content' doesn't hold water any more, and that it's 'heavily skewed' in Google's favour. It wants the government to explore 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.'"
[+]
AP Says "Share Your Revenue, Or Face Lawsuits" 293 comments
eldavojohn writes "The Associated Press is starting to feel the bite of the economic recession and said on Monday that they will 'work with portals and other partners who legally license our content and will seek legal and legislative remedies against those who don't.' They are talking about everything from search engines to aggregators that link to news articles and some sites that reproduce the whole news article. The article notes that in Europe legislative action has blocked Google from using news articles from some outlets similar to what was discussed here last week."
[+]
A.P. To Distribute Nonprofits' Investigative Journalism 56 comments
The NY Times is reporting on the Associated Press's decision to distribute the investigative journalism of four nonprofit groups. This ought to benefit both struggling newspapers, which have cut investigative staff, and the nonprofits where, we can hope, many of those laid-off journalists are plying their trade. It's refreshing to see this kind of forward thinking coming out of an organization not normally known for its progressiveness. "Starting on July 1, the A.P. will deliver work by the Center for Public Integrity, the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and ProPublica to the 1,500 American newspapers that are A.P. members, which will be free to publish the material. The A.P. called the arrangement a six-month experiment that could later be broadened to include other investigative nonprofits, and to serve its nonmember clients, which include broadcast and Internet outlets."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Re:Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, the state of corporate America these days. When the options boil down to - spending 20 minutes of a computer analysts time to put a proper robots.txt file up or spend tens of thousands of dollars to drag another company into court - and you pick the latter option?
What's the real motive here?
Parent
Re:Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog (Score:5, Funny)
The Parent and GP are missing the point. Publishers want their content in Google News -- they just want Google to pay them for it.
*WHAM!*
That's the sound of the hammer connecting with the nailhead.
Parent
Re:Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog (Score:5, Informative)
Putting up robots.txt doesn't solve the problem. That gets them off Google and the other aggregators, but doesn't get them what they want, which is either
1) To prevent Google and the other aggregators from aggregating at all (otherwise, having everyone but themselves on Google is pretty much corporate suicide)
or
2) To force Google to both aggregate AND to pay them for it.
Unfortunately for them, 2) pretty much requires legislative action. Even if they were to get the courts to declare aggregation to be copyright infringement, Google could just cut a deal with the smarter and/or more hungry papers to aggregate their stuff for free, leaving the whiners out in the cold with neither direct revenue nor eyeballs.
Parent
They want their cake and eat it (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog (Score:5, Insightful)
>> What's the real motive here?
They don't want Google to stop.
They want Google to pay them royalties.
Google should terminate its indexing of any newspaper that threatens to sue them.
Parent
Re:Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog (Score:5, Insightful)
Google needs them just as much as they need Google. Google can be an arrogant bunch at times, and they are a bit green in the ears when it comes to politics. The AP is threatening to sue because aside from legislation, it is one a point of leverage in negotiation.
I was going to say that Slashdot isn't a good example, but even this very story links to at least two major newspapers who I would guess are part of the NAA. What would Slashdot link to if they pulled the plug on aggregation?
Bottom line is, in the digital age how can you keep the people who write the stories that you and I are discussing employed?
Nothing is as easy as it first appears, and if it seems easy, you are probably forgetting something.
Parent
Re:Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Yeah this reader's _____ (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yeah this reader's _____ (Score:4, Funny)
Sometime tune into Fox News just for the hell of it
< 5 minutes will verify this statement
Parent
Dirty Schmidt (Score:5, Funny)
"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
Re:Dirty Schmidt (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd go with a quote from "The Dark Knight" instead:
Parent
This Just In... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This Just In... (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
The president of the internet division of the newspaper conglomerate I work for actually said this in response to a manager suggesting working more closely with Google to improve SEO: "We don't want users to search for our site. We need to focus on the users who are on our site and make it easier for them to find the content they want via our internal search." Yeah. We don't want silly new readers. And we don't want readers to be able to find us on search engines. They should just know to come here and when they're here, they'll then learn how to use a search engine - our search engine. I bet our search algorithms are totally better than google's.
Parent
Re:This Just In... (Score:5, Insightful)
How about instead of laughing, you think about what he actually means. Instead of thinking "OMG, stupid suits LOL", think "this guy knows more about business and marketing than I do, but doesn't know tech, what does he really mean".
Translation:
And he is right. People who come into a site via Google Search are the "wham, bam, thank you ma'am" kind. They hit the page, and go away. The only way to make money on this kind of traffic is to plaster your stories with advertising in hopes they exit via an ad rather than the back button. Is this what you want?
If you really want to be helpful, you should think about what the person means and help solve that. How can you make inbound Google traffic "sticky"? If you can't how can you maximize your ad revenue from that traffic? Is there a way to do both? Can you offer user-registration and when you visit when you are logged-in, strip out most of the ads (registered users never click on ads)? Can you somehow alter the layout of the page to offer additional content that might lure search engine traffic into reading more than just one page?
Think like a business person, not a nerd. Your president makes perfect sense.
Parent
The newspapers should do some user surveys (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I'm a little confused (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
I use google news (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
He may be a lawyer, but he doesn't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
'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.
This is Madness. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wrote a comment yesterday [slashdot.org] 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.
Newspapers abrogated their social contract (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lose readers... how about lose news sources? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Google Provides the Consumer Options (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent