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Comments: 290 +- News: Newspapers Face the Prisoner's Dilemma With Google on Friday November 27, @09:28AM
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by
kdawson
on Friday November 27, @09:28AM
from the you-sneak-up-behind-the-guard-see dept.
from the you-sneak-up-behind-the-guard-see dept.
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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."
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What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the fastest growing Dutch news papers is directly aimed at 25-35 year old men who get most of their news online. I love it. It's a format that works well.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I see. So. I think the general discussion is about newspapers. Not the thinly disguised escort service fliers that you pick up in most cities.
Re:What? (Score:4, Funny)
I see. So. I think the general discussion is about newspapers. Not the thinly disguised escort service fliers that you pick up in most cities.
Maybe it's because I live in a city where escort service fliers don't need to disguise themselves thinly?
Parent
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
I read the New York times every day. I'm 28. I know I'm in the minority, but I get things from a paper I don't get from a website or an rss feed. It's portable, it's easier on the eyes, it's got a crossword puzzle in it I can do with a pen and all that tactile stuff, but also it's better for my brain - the 'net is good at giving me information I'm looking for, but it blows at giving me information I didn't know I needed until I read the headline. I learn more from 15 minutes reading the paper on my commute every morning than I would get from an hour in front of the computer. YMMV.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you missed the point. The parent was not arguing with the actual thesis that more people are getting their news online. The argument was that 10 years ago twenty-somethings still weren't reading newspapers, regardless of whether or not they had internet access. Speaking as someone who was twenty-something ten years ago or so, I tend to agree. I didn't read newspapers as a general rule, and even though I did have internet access, I didn't use it to get news either.
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Newspapers have several issues to deal with.
1. Craigslist is killing them. Classified ads had to be a huge income stream. I know that just a single help wanted ad in my market was well over $100 and we are not a big market.
2. Costs. They are expensive to print and deliver.
I have not gotten the paper in years. At best they are worth it for the coupons but a web based or even better yet a mobile based way to get them would be much better. Plus my local supermarkets are now using direct mail to send those to me.
I hate the format of a paper. It is too big to be easy to read. The pages are huge and most of it I just don't care about.
The one thing I have to say that I miss is local news but I get that from a website now.
Now here is what I wonder. How much news comes through Google? I tend to just go to CNN.com or tcpalm.com to get my news. I almost never search for news. I doubt that I will head to Bing anytime soon so yes I think this is all going to be a disaster. Will Microsoft be willing to pay everybody to jump to Bing? And will a few hold outs make some big money being the news source on Google and also being on Bing?
Seems to me that is the risk they news services that do this run.
Parent
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Craigslist is killing them.
To be precise, their costs are killing them, because they can't compete with superior alternatives like Craigslist and other online advertising services.
-jcr
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Google already gives publishers a way out of caching pages. It's in their own best interests to take advantage of the capabilities the googlebot gives them.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft can do whatever deals they want with Murdoch and his friends, but the simple fact at the moment is that Bing is rather a poor example of a search engine, and people will vote with their mice.
Every so often I try using Bing (in an attempt to be fair), but the relevance of its results is at best equivalent in to what I remember as typical of AltaVista back in in 1997. That's just not good enough. If the guys at Microsoft want Bing to b
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Our company is making a significant investment in tracking these online ads and not for nothing.
P.S. If you shop at a large grocery chain its about 1 million dollars that changes hands each week for the items in ad.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I just left a newspaper because all they were doing was repeatedly laying people off and giving out paycut after paycut. They talked about how they were doing better than most newspapers in the country, and yet revenue kept dropping more and more each quarter.
I know that some newspapers faced bankruptcy for other reasons (The Chicago Tribune Company's equity was mortgaged for bad real estate deals) but we kept hearing about paper after paper going into bankruptcy.
I've seen several magazines stop printing as
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
...flame-bait articles...
Isn't that what fire-lighters are for?
I Don't See the Comparison, More Like MLB Strike (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] (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.
Re:I Don't See the Comparison, More Like MLB Strik (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Google News (Score:3, Informative)
Google is big enough to just buy or create their own newspaper. If the newspapers cut themselves off from Google there is no reason for Google not to compete with them. Hire their own journalistic team to create high-quality content that people actually want to see instead of the dribble in most newspapers. They could take advantage of technology to be something between a newspaper (text) and tv news (multimedia).
never happen (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Parent
Google already licenses the AP feeds (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Google already licenses the AP feeds (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe we should ask Andy Coulson [wikipedia.org] about that one (ex editor of News Of the World - a Murdoch title - and current 'Strategist' for the Conservatives). If he can buy out the UK's free source, he can buy out any other 'not for profit' options.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Google paid AP because it represented an end-run around the newspapers. It was a shot across their bow, a statement that they could be made irrelevant. As has been said elsewhere, the majority of content in these papers comes from AP... and damned near the rest comes from Reuters — which Google also indexes. Ultimately, the papers derive the greatest benefit from providing google index access to articles, and then making them subscriber-only after a week or so, like several do already. To block google
Re:I Don't See the Comparison, More Like MLB Strik (Score:4, Informative)
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.
To block Google from all site pages:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
To block Google indexing a certain page (exchange brackets for > / <):
[meta name="googlebot" content="noindex"]
To be less specific in the user-agent line of robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Parent
Re:I Don't See the Comparison, More Like MLB Strik (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I think the assumption is that allowing Google to index your news site is like ratting. With two sources of news:
If neither rats (lets Google index their news) then both sites get the brand awareness and ad revenue.
If one site rats, then Google gets some of their ad revenue, but they get all the Google directed traffic, which is a win for the ratter.
If both rat (the current status quo), then Google get some of the ad revenue from both sources of content.
What is best for a single site, in order, is:
1. Google
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
If one rats on the other, the rat goes free, while the other gets 20 years in prison.
Incidentally, the one who went free was later killed in a mysterious accident.
No Dilemma (Score:5, Insightful)
I for one would welcome... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Hope (Score:3, Funny)
Inflict Damage? (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? Losing links to the various News Corp sites will "inflict damage" on Google's business?
Really?
Re:Inflict Damage? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the "inflict damage" comment meant if a MAJORITY of news sources pulled out of Google, not just News Corp.
I didn't wriite it, I'm just trying to interpret...
The point of the article is that unless virtually ALL of the news sources leave at once, the result will really just be that those who are left will profit by the others voluntarily removing themselves from the competition.
Personally I think it is a gutsy but stupid move...
Parent
NPR, BBC anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is why the viewpoint in the summary is flawed. I do not believe for example that the BBC would be allowed to delist from Google due to laws governing it because it's publicly funded and can't show competition bias.
I doubt the BBC is unique in this situation either, and the reality is for every thousand companies that delist from Google and follow Murdoch, there'll still be a BBC picking up the search results.
Users wont stop using Google, they'll just pick whatever the first result is on a search whethe
Re:NPR, BBC anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Firstly, the WSJ editorial pages are propaganda tools, so I assume you mean the news and analysis pages. As far as those go, I have come across people who will name drop it during discussions, but I work in finance, and these are probably people who decided early on they were going into finance and read it religiously since 4th grade or something. Anyhow, they are a minority of the people I know. In general however, nobody goes around quoting WSJ, if they can quote the BBC ad (although less so), NPR. I know NPR is affected by cutbacks, and is quite shoddy compared to the BBC; but to say that the WSJ has more credibility than the BBC? Not in my world. Do they even have correspondents in 25% of the places the BBC does? Do people in far off countries gather around a radio and tune in to the WSJ?
Parent
The Newspapers Have it All Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
When the newspaper corporations continue to spout how the visitors brought in by the search engines are worthless because those people are drive-by visitors, I have to wonder about their content. If someone is brought in by a search engine they should be considered an opportunity. If you are not taking the time to ensure your design and content are meant to draw those opportunities into a goal, well, I think you're looking at this from the wrong way.
This is yet another reason why the newspaper industry just doesn't get it. Google gets it and so do the consumers. Microsoft doesn't get anything more than the bone they are being thrown.
I wish people would stop reporting on this story as, honestly, it's just a lame attempt at getting attention.
Relevancy (Score:5, Interesting)
So even if Google doesn't index, say, the Wall Street Journal, can't Google still get the same news contributions form the AP newswire?
Or is there something special about AP license terms or something?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think I recall seeing something about that.
I don't know about most people, but I stopped reading the major newspapers (even online) late last year when they became nothing but AP parrots with weird spin jobs.
I mean, I know they were always AP parrots before, but it got *really* bad with the economy. The obsession with very specific stories is completely out of hand.
I'll stick with just the direct AP feeds, thank you.
Biggest lemming run in history (Score:3, Informative)
They are a commodity (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It Still Won't Work (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a horse that won't run and the only reason why Murdoch is banging on about it is because News Corp is making some sizeable losses with no end in sight.
DUPE - but not Slashdot's (Score:5, Insightful)
Carr has railed about this problem before, and he's still just as wrong as he ever was.
Here's his analysis of Murdoch's first pronouncements [roughtype.com] on the topic back in April. And here's why he's just as wrong now [imagicity.com] as he was then.
(I later turned that post into a newspaper column [imagicity.com] in the country where I live. It's longer and slightly more polished, but more focused on our particular issues, which aren't necessarily germane to the larger debate.)
No problemo (Score:3, Insightful)
Alright, so some American newspapers put up walled gardens. No problem, I'll just read the foreign press. BBC does a good job, and so do many others.
Targeted news and branding their writers (Score:3, Insightful)
Biased, targetted news sells well. Those are the facts. Whether you prefer Fox News or Huffington Post, people enjoy going to a news source that tells people what they want to hear.
Newspapers need to find their niche in targetting local news. Here in Omaha, the big news is stories on the Nebraska Cornhuskers.
Furthermore, I know that I am fairly agnostic about generic news, but I do search out certain authors I enjoy reading. I just left a newspaper, but I often encouraged them to do more to brand their writers. Put more photos of writers in the paper. Push those huge bylines. If someone really likes reading Tom Shatel (local sports columnist for the paper I just left) then they will specifically look for his content.
Furthermore, Google has already said they want to pay newspapers for the content they produce. Our stories already go into an AP feed that others aggregate for free. When big stories happen (our mall shooting last year for instance) we had people all over the world recycling the World-Herald's story. Some linked back, and others didn't. When the BBC recycled the story, they didn't pay the World-Herald for it. However, Google is saying they do want to pay for content.
So how is Google this evil entity that newspapers must rail against? If they were smart, they'd sign up with Google to start selling their content today, and start collecting checks. Newspapers who want to survive in the new market must transition somewhat to a content producer rather than focusing solely on selling a printed product.
Re:Great! (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah instead you'll get bloggers interpretation of news stories on the front page. Haha.
Parent
Re:Last gasp of the newspaper (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Compared to blogs and much of the citizen reporting that is found online newspapers are still very good at weeding out the rubbish. The problem is that a lot of people only want the read things that confirm their own preconceptions, and are not interested in learning anything that challenges them. On of the big problems with online news sources is that people can customize the new that they receive to the point that they are essentially in an echo chamber.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
>The problem for newspapers is that the number of thinking
>people is shrinking, while the number of those who now simply
>own a keyboard is increasing.
I disagree. I suspect that the number of thinking people is actually increasing. The problem is that the idiots have a much louder voice today than they have ever had before, thanks (as you say) to the keyboard. Before about fifteen years ago it was very hard for most whack-job ideas to get a large audience. Now, it is very easy, and the people wh
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.economist.com/ [economist.com]
Answer: (Score:3, Insightful)
A monthly bill from the WSJ.