Google tells newspapers: ‘Innovate to survive’

Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, has told the newspaper industry it needs to innovate in order to survive the digital age. Speaking to an audience at the Newspaper Association of America’s annual meeting, he said that newspapers remained a fundamental part of modern life, and that the key for their future growth would be finding a way to adapt to the challenges and opportunities presented by new technologies, such as mobile phones. Schmidt said that one of the fundamental reasons for problems within the industry had been newspapers’ failure to meet readers’ wishes and embrace new digital platforms. “I would encourage everybody: think in terms of what your reader wants,” he said. “These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you p*** off enough of them, you will not have any more.” – from Telegraph

The Associated Press (AP) recently issued a press release announcing plans to develop an initiative to “protect” the newspaper industry’s content online. Since then, some readers, users and journalists have asked us if the AP’s plan is about Google since we host complete AP articles. The answer is that it doesn’t appear to pertain to Google since we host those articles in partnership with the AP. We announced that partnership in 2007 as part of an experiment in hosting articles on our site. In hosting agreements such as this, we pay news agencies and display the entire text of articles, such as this one from the AP about President Obama’s visit to Turkey. We drive traffic and provide advertising in support of all business models — whether news sources choose to host their articles with us or on their own sites, and whether their business model is ad-supported or based on subscriptions. In all cases, for news articles we’ve crawled and indexed but do not host, we show users just enough to make them want to read more — the headline, a “snippet” of a line or two of text and a link back to to the news publisher’s website. – from Google

“Google indicates that they want to work with us,” said William Dean Singleton, the chief executive of MediaNews Group, which owns 54 dailies in 11 states. But “they haven’t been as cooperative as others, like Yahoo.” Mr. Singleton’s comments are not terribly surprising. Mr. Singleton helped put together a group of newspaper companies that signed a far-reaching agreement with Yahoo back in 2006. Since then, the Newspaper Consortium, as the group has become known, has grown, and its relationship with Yahoo has deepened. – from NYTimes

Google does not understand journalism. It just wants content that drives traffic. The cheapest, most derivative churnalism will do this, but original reporting does it better. So Google aggregates stories written by expensive, professional reporters and blithely overlooks how much these people cost to train, hire and deploy. The tiny pittances it remits to news organisations will not pay for a fraction of the political, business, foreign and investigative reporting we are accustomed to. But Google does not care. It imagines the fourth estate is a derelict development somewhere in fantasy land and that journalism is just another tradeable commodity. – from Guardian