

Why Google is bad for the newspaper business - dsplittgerber
http://blogmaverick.com/2010/02/03/why-google-is-bad-for-the-newspaper-business/

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natmaster
I have a new article entitled, "Why electricity is bad for the candle
business."

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stanleydrew
And that article would be very easy to write, but not at all analogous to this
one.

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hristov
It is not surprising this comes from Mark Cuban, he has had it in for Google
since they bought Youtube.

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.

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stanleydrew
The link here should probably read: "Why Google News is bad for the newspaper
business."

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.

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gr366
Whether Google News is good or bad for a newspaper's online business is also
partly a function of how big the newspaper is. Google News seems to frequently
promote the biggest sources (NY Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, LA
Times) with the main headline for a story and lump in the smaller players
among the "2,000 plus sources". If you're a big player, it's probably fine to
be part of 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.

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robryan
If your offering news that is being reported by 2000 other sources and your
not a big player then you are really asking for problems.

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.

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jsz0
Are news stands that sell dozens of publications also bad for the newspaper
business? I don't goto the New York Times store to buy the paper -- I goto the
new stand where the New York Times is just one of many choices. The news stand
may only offer a couple dozen choices and not 2,000 but there's a diminishing
return at some point. I'm most likely going to pick one of the first 5-10
stories on Google News and that's almost always linking to a popular
mainstream publication.

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dspeyer
>When that consumer goes to Google News, it lists the

> 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.

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Groxx
_Newspapers_ are bad for the newspaper business.

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._

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InclinedPlane
Newspapers are burdened by their failure to break out of the convolution of
the idea of their identity with their historical form. Newspapers are still
stuck on the model of providing a "full" news experience to its readers much
in the same way that many failed big dot-coms (Excite comes to mind) held too
long to the "portal" model of the web during the first dot-com boom/bust.

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.

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joe_the_user
From comments on the page:

 _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.

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terrellm
Ironic considering he is an investor in Mahalo
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097661>

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stanleydrew
Not that ironic considering Mahalo is not primarily a big-brand news
organization. His frustration is with Google News, not with Google Search.

