Is Google helping or harming the newspaper industry? There’s always two sides to every story. But Rupert Murdoch only sees one of them. He says Google is stealing copyrights and has urged media outlets to fight back by not allowing users to be able to search for content, like Murdoch’s publications, through Google. (Read the Forbes story here). And of course, Google has fought back, saying that it sends more than 300 million clicks a month to newspaper web sites.
In my opinion, the business relationship that new distribution channels like Google have created is a catch 22. Google does not produce any journalism, but it sorts through news stories and organizes them for users who in turn click on those stories and bring business to the news sites that users might otherwise not even have known about. Sometimes I search for news on Google, and it brings me to news sites that I have never been to but end up liking and going back to again.
Of course, it does seem sometimes like Google benefits the most because more people use Google than they actually use news sites, but news “sites like WSJ.com rely on Google to send hem readers, working hard to game how they appear on Google through the dark arts of search engine optimization.” Although WSJ Managing Editor Robert Thomson did say that “Google devalues everything it touches, [and] it divides content quantitatively rather than qualitatively.”
I guess it’s up to the reader then to decide what content is the best and what is actually worth reading. Google shouldn’t necessarily be blamed because more users click one site over another. Not that I don’t see the news sites’ side of this either. Again, it’s a catch 22.
Yeah this is a pretty crazy story. I just posted something similar. I’m very doubtful Murdoch can take on Google like this and expect to come out victorious. I’d like to see him try though, either way it’ll be interesting.
Comment by rainabee247 — November 25, 2009 @ 12:56 AM |