Why Google is bad for the newspaper business
blogmaverick.com
blogmaverick.com
But I have to give Cuban some credit here. He actually provides plausible, logically consistent, well reasoned arguments. I am not sure he is correct, but at least his arguments are well reasoned. He does not go into hysterics about how Google is stealing like some other billionaires you may have heard of.
There is however one counter argument that Cuban did not mention. If a well known newspaper leaves Google News, then they are opening the door for competitors. If a person goes to Google news, and sees a story by their trusted paper, they will click on that story even if it is one of 2000. But if he does not see their trusted newspaper, will they go to the trusted newspaper's webpage or would they simply say "well lets try this new site I have not heard of before" and then discover that the new site is just as good or maybe even better than their trusted newspaper.
Finally, we are starting to see some of these media companies and investors start to be a little more precise in their attacks against Google! I don't care if you agree with the attacks or not, at least now we know that what Mark Cuban is really mad about is Google News, not Google Search results. For awhile there I was legitimately confused as to why Murdoch and the bunch were threatening to remove themselves from Google's index, when I thought what they should really be mad about is Google News.
If you're a smaller player, maybe you needn't be covering stories that the big players are covering. Your readers are probably already only coming to you for local news anyway (part of the reason AP and Reuters content so often supplements a site). Reporting on more local stories could make you more likely to become the de facto source for your Local News section within Google News.
I've heard anecdotally that Yahoo's front door (which shows headlines from 3rd party sources) and Drudge are the biggest drivers of traffic to newspaper sites. Note that neither of those referrers tries to point out a dozen other sources for the story.
The problem I see with Google news is that a long thoughtful, drawn out opinion/ investigation piece gets lumped into the same pile as paragraph summaries in the 2000 sources. What needs to happen, and I think the best way to approach this is a combination of software and community, is that the straight news piece i split from the further investigation and opinion pieces and the best quality piece rises to the top.
I've also though about the possibility of making money from ads on a news aggregation site and then passing part of the profit onto sources based on the clickthroughs they generate, so basically it would be another incentive for content producers to produce better content.
> number of sources. You immediately become one of 2,172
> articles. It is never good for a brand to be considered
> one of 2,000 plus sources. Ever. That makes you a
> commodity. All that promotion you did saying how good
> your reporters are ? On its way to becoming worthless.
TL;DR = You've been trying to pretend you matter, but Google is revealing this as lies.
They're as panicky as all the other media companies, though at least most newspaper companies have functional websites. They fight change so hard they end up being left in the dust by it.
Quit complaining about how you find it hard to be unique. Everyone has that problem. Try doing what used to work, and still does: stand out in the crowd by doing it better than the crowd.
In an era where communication is difficult there is value in aggregating that communication (local news, national news, international news, business news, sports, weather, broadcast advertisements, etc.) into one coherent source. There's a great network effect in that model. However, that model is broken by modern technology which has dramatically lowered the cost of communication. There no longer is any value to regurgitating the same AP wire report in the local paper since the cost to distribute such reports to the entire world are practically nil in the modern age.
There is still value in unique, original reporting but modern news institutions do so little of that. This is where the conflict comes from. The value of a newspaper was once the sum of the value of the network effect of the readership (e.g. in regards to classified ads) and the transmission of non-local news and the original reporting. Today none of those things have true value except the last. And, unfortunately for most papers, this is the most difficult, most costly, and lowest margin aspect of the entire paper.
There's still value in some of the things newspapers do, but newspapers still insist on defining themselves in forms that are no longer financially sensible in the context of modern technology. Until that changes (maybe via most newspapers dying and being replaced by more modern institutions) newspapers will continue their long slow slide into oblivion.
Mark, you’re absolutely right that it “is never good for a brand to be considered one of 2,000 plus sources.” Is this Google’s fault for creating this perception in the eyes of you and me? Absolutely not. Newspapers have become a cheap “news” provider- in no way consistent with what they stood for years ago – legitimate reporting, digging up facts and stories that actually mattered and were relevant to people, etc. not just the ridiculous garbage they call front-page news nowadays.
Sums up the problem with this article.
The claim that Google is bad for the newspaper business is certain but the question is whether that's bad thing (also, craigslist has actually been much worse for newspapers than Google). If newspapers in general could make claim for consistent quality, for integrity in editorial policy and so-forth, the claim for Google being a bad thing could be justified but they can't. Ruppert Murdoch defending journalism? Please!
The newspaper business have both been hit terribly by the Internet. The problem is, they were fat, greedy monopolies which wilted in the face of open competition. I'd probably feel more for literary journals - but I think these have been hit more by how much people read.