Actually it is.

> If our streets (searches) are controlled by muggers (aggregators),

Searches aren’t “our streets” – they’re a service provided by Google. If you don’t want to be available via Google search, you’re free to opt out.

Google doesn’t provide content; it just delivers traffic. If you don’t want that traffic, opt out.

Sites that participate in Google News do so because they want traffic.

Surely you’re not going to argue that Google has some obligation to provide traffic on terms other than those that Google wants. If so, I’m going to ask why the NYT isn’t obligated to provide coverage for my stuff. I’m also going to ask why the NYT isn’t obligated to ask my permission before citing my work or telling people how to get it from me. (After all, that’s what links do.)

That’s like blaming paper for the Washington Post’s exposure of Watergate.

Jeff, you’re probably astute enough to know and understand all this. To my eyes, everything having to do with imperialism is supremely evil. That includes Yankee Imperialism. Imperialism being a euphemism for genocide. (Demographic genocide, cultural genocide, informational genocide, libertarian genocide, financial genocide, nutritional genocide, etc.). The MSM and its propaganda priests are card-carrying members of the imperialist class. These people deserve no mercy, and neither does the corrupt government mafia and corrupt judiciary, that has been bought and paid for. They should all be run out town.

the issue here is a fundamental one – the net has dropped the cost of content distribution to nearly zero. It has also dropped the cost of shopping for content as a consumer to near zero.

I’m hardly old, but I remember when the only way to read the NYT was to hike down to my local library. And forget about trying to find the Indy Star to read up on Colts coverage.

But if content distribution is free, if the cost to find new content is free and the desire to produce content is unrelated to material gain (like spending 10 minutes typing this post) – then we wind up with more content (audience) than advertising.

In other words – total content volume in the pre-digital world was artificially constrained by ad spending. Effective content volume (what an individual consumer could readily access) was constrained by cost and geography. The internet, by reducing or eliminating market barriers, broke that linkage between content and advertising volumes.

So I think Jeff is right – it is ‘your’ problem if ‘you’ are an old-line media company trying to extract value from audience in a deflationary environment.

Stan is right on in his comment below that the value in this new environment doesn’t come close to sustaining the content production built under the old system.

It never will.

But blaming that on aggregators, or emergent media, or free content is kind of like John Henry getting mad at the steam engine.

It’s not that clear cut.

—Who are you to tell the sites on Google News that they’re wrong?

If our streets (searches) are controlled by muggers (aggregators), it’s not a choice to stay at home (to stay out of searches) to avoid getting mugged.

All I’m saying is stop the outlawed muggers!

Do you “buy” a newspaper for the headlines, or the story??

You say Google “edits” the news. What they do is pick which headlines to run.

Google is sending these sites TRAFFIC. A lot of this is traffic that these papers would have NEVER received but for the fact that Google put up the headline link to the story! I’d say that’s an EXTREMELY good trade. If the paper CAN’T MAKE MONEY off the eyeballs they do get, then how is reducing the number of eyeballs (by cutting out Google) going to suddenly make them profitable??

Sites appear on Google News because they choose to do so.

http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=94003

They’re free to block specific content before Google News shows it or after.

http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=11709

I’d guessing that the most popular Google News page for news organizations is http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=11662 .

Who are you to tell the sites on Google News that they’re wrong?

Google News puts a lot of effort, although much of it is software development, in the selection (editing) and the presentation (editing) of the news (that they mostly get for free from others) to detour and attract an audience into their publication.

And yes! they do not provide content, they take snippets from news gatherers to publish their edition, —where their intention is clearly to provide a publication—, which is attractive because it gives a brief look at selected news from a universe of publications, —which is in itself a unique and unfair advantage over any individual publication.

It’s undoubtedly a “publication” with no self gathered content, which is promoted in every Google News link in every toolbar, search and the gazillion daily interactions with Google (newsstands).

Then there is also the “offer and demand” issue. With some caveats, we may assume that the demand for advertising should not have changed with the newer technology. But, each aggregator site has a multiplier effect on the offer of available space to advertise. As a consequence, advertising prices should’ve dropped &mdas;and we know they have plummeted!

A copyrighted material may be “Fair Use(d)” as long as it doesn’t harm the author. Clearly, Google and other aggregators are harming the legacy brands and their advertising income source by multiplying the venues.

To put it simply. How valuable is the name The New York Times, or The Wall Street Journal? and so on… You can buy the equipment and hire personnel, but…

If people go to Google for their news, they will forget whose in the back room serving the news.

Google News is a “publication”. Google makes a concerted effort to edit the news in order to attract an audience, with the aggravation that they are picking in the process the best articles of the litter — mostly, at no expense.

Another example. Google is giving away telephone numbers for free, how long will it be till they take control of the voice communications industry too?

Maybe you would get upset if you had a relative (a publication like Google News) hitching (aggregating) a free ride on your car to work every day, with you paying for the car (investment), and the gas and oil (expenses)…

What if he took a friend along and charged him for the ride (advertised), like Newser, Yahoo news and other aggregators? Wouldn’t you feel that a little annoyed?

What if the car you were riding was a taxi (publication), because it’s how you make a living, and somehow you feel that you no longer can meet your obligations, that you’re losing money?

Old news can become new, hot news depending on circumstances.

For example, scientific studies conducted beginning in 1999 indicated that the seabed of the Gulf of Mexico was unstable because of hydrates, and that drilling there could cause a catastrophic ecological and economic disaster.

Old news but hot news non-the-less.

When I go to Google and click on the “News” link, I get a bunch of links to stories. Those links consist of a headline, and in some cases, what appears to be the first one or two sentences from the story, and maybe a thumbnail photo.

If I click on the link, I get taken to the original site of the story.

How in hell is this “Google stealing their news content”????

Or am I seriously missing somehting??

And you are the one deciding what “necessary” means, right?

No thanks…

People want a lot of things —including free rides. Why not do away with private property, mine claims… maybe allow rape, some people want that too…

Let’s all get whatever we want… let’s have some schmucks do the hard work for us and we take it away from them!

Sure, legacy news organizations made the huge miscalculation of thinking that online advertising would cover the news gathering expense. It didn’t.

The biggest misalignments with the new technoly are that news gathering or readers are mostly a local rather than an ubiquitous world wide affair. It’s not possible to get the facebook or Google search number of visits to a local news outlet. Further, content gathering is expensive, whilst facebook or Google content is freely provided by users.

I have no problem with people getting to a news site through a Google search. But, Google News aggregation is a totally different story.

Copyright allows fair use of content as a way of balancing the use of a small amount of content with the benefit of the attribution to the author. Or, in other words, where there is no harm done to the author.

Google news, or any other succesful aggregator harms the brand of the legacy news gatherer. After a few years, why would any reader in search of news go the NYT, or a WAPO site… if they are used to getting all their legacy news at the aggregator’s site.

Google news is a publication that is riding on the hard work of journalists working at the legacy news outlets, and as experience is showing, it’s an unsustainable situation —nobody can work for free, ayt least not for long!

And, let’s not kid ourselves, eventually, when the last legacy news organization folds, Google will take the spoils… and journalists will be working for chinese wages.

Is there any good reason not to pay for honest hard work?

You scold media companies for doing exactly what you have been preaching. They have given away their product in order to drive web numbers. They have been successful at that, at least, owning the local online audience. But that’s not enough. The money isn’t coming in, so they decide those numbers must continue to grow and the prize will suddenly appear. They allow sites to aggregate their content, giving those sites the appearance of legitimate news outlets. They’ve give up the franchise to pretenders.

The payoff is a link. A link economy, as you say. Where is the economy? It does not exist, at least at a level that would come close to sustaining the ability to produce the content they have been giving away. You have insulted journalists again and again yet demand their product for your vision of this new economy.

Media companies have been using bogus metrics like page views and unique visitors and advertisers aren’t buying. What good is my ad on a site that gets a great portion of its traffic from fark? Shared selling of national advertising? Are you kidding?

Newspapers belong to a cooperative, AP, that charges them tens of thousands of dollars a month in many cases for its content, then makes deals with online giants that devalues that content for the media companies. AP is facing a revolt from its “members” unless it takes steps to restore its product’s value.

Finally Jeff, you love love to use “old” and “new” as your dismissive key words. Your “new” is a path to failure. Good “old” common sense needs to return. That means re-embracing the belief that what journalists produce has value that can be monetized by keeping it as exclusive as possible. The free-for-all must end. You can’t grasp that.

What’s a journalist and why is paying them relevant?

Heck – what’s a news organization? Is the NRA a news organization?

I know what reporting and opinion writing is, but that doesn’t seem to produce the “leeway” results desired.

Why wouldn’t Reuters get revenue from advertising on Reuter’s site? If they didn’t, why would they carry it?

Yahoo’s home page delivers traffic for a fee. How those sites turn said traffic into revenue is up to them.

Note that search delivers traffic for free….

Google is justified in assembling links to news stories, because it performs an important function for users of the Web, and it sends links to news sites. The cash value of that traffic is debatable, but it doesn’t constitute a theft any more than would an advertisement that would send customers to a local store. On the other hand, a “news” site should not borrow the entire content of a news story, or all news stories, from a legitimate newsgathering organization, without doing its own work. It is theft to let someone else do the work and then swoop in to collect the profits; organizations like that are functioning more like a racketeers than news outlets.

Perhaps there should be more leeway for organizations that actually employ journalists. If the assumption is that news organizations borrow from one another, then borrowing background information from last week, or last month, should be allowed for full time reporters; and borrowing todays news, without contributing any new information to the story, and without crediting the source, should be forbidden.