News media

Valerion · #1

Groklaw has always interested me, because P.J. writes clear and well-reasoned arguments for her statements, even when I disagree with them. She wrote a piece about the recent Google / Media Industry spat. wihch I found interesting. And some of the comments were insightful too.

The way I see the problem, the news media wants to find another revenue source, getting paid for viewers seeing their stories. So, they are claiming Google News is violating their copyright. Google says that

They are only using bits of the news article, so Fair Use applies
They have an agreement with AP
They send the viewer on to the newspaper's site
Have no ads on their news aggregator
You can VERY easily opt out of having your news carried

Google seems to be calling their bluff, in essence saying that if it's copyright violation, they agree to stop linking. The problem is, some sites estimate that up to 19% of newspaper site visits are from Google alone.

Personally I cannot even visit aggregator sites any more, which is why I use RSS feeds, to handle the amount of stuff on the net I want to read, compared to the time I have free to read it in. News aggregators are also fulfilling this role, giving you a choice of which articles to read.

The newspaper industry has lost the advertising business now. The advertisers moved online, away from papers. Editors cut costs by firing staff and reducing investigative journalism. This is part of what caused fewer people to read their papers, and this reulted in the papers having less of an audience to sell to the advertisers. Smaller audience = less advertisement. Instead the advertising business went to places like Craigslist, where users turn to precisely BECAUSE it is free to visit.

Some of the comments I read earlier this week speculated that the newspaper industry doesn't want readers to know that they all subscribe to feeds like AP and rely on it for their news, publishing it completely unedited. And when you put two sites next to one another in an aggregator, it's very obvious.

IOL (I do visit them a lot lately) uses a different technique. They usually state something along the lines of "Please read today's Star for the full article". Problem is - I sometimes read it weeks after the story was published. And the Mercury doesn't get sold here in Gauteng, as far as I know, so that's not always viable either.

Generally I think it's a problem with old media business models (See the Music industry, for example) not working with the Internet. The Internet allows information exchange to be truly free - computers were made to copy data amongst themselves, and the Internet has always relied on that. People have come to expect it. People want to charge for everytihng. However, you CAN make money from a free product, and if your margins are small enough, you can make money on volumes alone.