Guardian Column: Newspapers and search
My latest Media Guardian column — this one about the foolish publishers trying to shut themselves off from Google … and thus the public — is up here (and here). A snippet:
The World Association of Newspapers is portraying Google as an enemy of news. I wouldn’t say that. I’d call Google something between a necessary evil and a friend - and if news organisations are smart, they will learn how to befriend the beast. …At this month’s Online Publishers Association conference in London, WAN managing director Ali Rahnema asked: “Could this content exist if someone else wasn’t paying to create it?” Well, in the quaint Americanism of my hillbilly roots, I’d say Rahnema got this bassackwards. Instead, we soon will be asking, “Could this content exist if someone else wasn’t linking to it?”
Tags: google, guardian, newspapers, norg, search
March 14th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
How about, “If content exists but no one can find it, does anybody care?”
March 21st, 2006 at 1:03 pm
[...] But what this means is that Google is no longer just an aggregator — which, I’ve argued, is a beneficial thing to be for content holders, because an aggregator makes links and links make traffic — but is now a destination that will hold users in and compete with other content. [...]
March 30th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
[...] The World Association of Newspapers recently announced that it intends to “challenge the exploitation of content” by online news aggregators like Google News. At the recent Online Publishers Association conference in London, one panel discussion supported this position. At the conference and in his Guardian column, Jeff Jarvis criticised the WAN’s stance. [...]
April 16th, 2007 at 12:52 am
[...] there’s what Jeff Jarvis surfaces through related observations in a Guardian column. He opens by saying the World Association of [...]