Forum Moderators: not2easy
Source:Reuters, Washington - [news.yahoo.com...]
Murdoch also addressed concerns among newspaper publishers that search engines like Google Inc and Yahoo Inc help users to find stories by aggregating links to newspapers websites and blogs -- but then wrest ad dollars from them that they think should be theirs."The question is, should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyright... not steal, but take," said Murdoch. "Not just them but Yahoo."
To me those are fighting words and this is my response
#1 - Nobody holds a copyright on the news, the copyright lays with the written word so Mr Murdoch is free to block the search engines and to force anyone who wants to read what his company writes to pay. That would be a business decision.
To simply say the internet is broken because it doesn't suit your business model is a farce.
#2 - Print publications are closing down because they are being replaced by the internet. To me that suggests print newspapers are going the way of milk delivery and vinyl records and forcing the internet to take serious steps backwards in order to increase news company profits is absurd.
Mr Murdoch, you're charged with needing to find a way to make print based journalism more attractive so that it's used more... you are NOT welcome to attempt to make the internet less attractive instead. Build up the value of print without trying to re-create the internet.
#3 - If big corporation news companies and major print publications can't turn a profit because a more readily available global medium exists then it may very well be time to consider the age of print journalism over.
Again, Mr Murdoch, if you choose to pay a high priced team of executives, lawyers and writers to write articles but find that those articles don't cover your expenses you are free to charge for them or not share them at all... both would be business decisions.
I find it hard to support the idea of pointing the blame finger at the internet when a product no longer competes. I am aware that lives and jobs are affected but to put it bluntly Mr Murdoch, your business is with News Corp, not with attempting to re-create the internet law books to better profit from it (at everyone elses expense).
the other papers are hiding behind an unappetising "all 1000+ news articles". (it even goes as high 7000+.) but even if you are very generous and lower it to 500+, that means that 98.4% of the papers that google takes info from every day are never going to see any benefit.
so google's argument that they are doing these papers a favour by advertising their sites doesn't really hold water -- a user would have to trawl all the way through that second page of 500+ articles to find it. how many people are going to bother doing that when the major papers are already covered on the front.
I check gnews 15-20 times a day. I read about 10-15 stories a day and almost always on the first visit. The rest of the day I am consuming content from those news sites without ever visiting those news sites. And now, google serves me a nice ad along side that content.
On Google News pages? Odd. I've never seen an ad on a Google News page.
Maybe the fair solution is for Google to pay newspapers a share of the ad revenue from Google News pages that have search ads, and to charge newspapers a fee for inclusion on Google News pages that don't have search ads.
can someone give a URL on Google News where there is actual content?
