Dow Jones chief: Google a ‘digital vampire’
By Andrew Heining | 06.25.09
It’s no secret that the honchos at News Corp. and other major news sources are no fan of Google. But the latest salvo in their love-hate relationship got a little more … gruesome.
In a keynote address to the PricewaterhouseCoopers Entertainment and Media Outlook event Tuesday, Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton compared Google to a vampire, sucking the blood out of the newspaper industry, according to Crain’s New York Business.
“There is a charitable view of the history of Google,” said Mr. Hinton, who is also publisher of The Wall Street Journal. “[It] didn’t actually begin life in a cave as a digital vampire per se. The charitable view of Google is that the news business itself fed Google’s taste for this kind of blood.”
That era of “feeding itself” to Google and other news aggregators may be coming to an end. News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch last month told investors that more of his company’s Web sites would be following The Wall Street Journal’s lead and erecting pay walls. On the same earnings call, Murdoch expressed interest in an ebook reader to challenge Amazon’s Kindle.
For its part, Google recognizes that without content to back it up, its popular news aggregator wouldn’t be anything. Google relies on “the production of very, very high-quality content. If the people who are producing that are getting laid off, it’s really a tragedy for both. So we need the high-quality content,” CEO Eric Schmidt said in a May Financial Times interview.
So where does Google get that “high-quality content” if news sites cease allowing Google to scrape them for stories? One solution: Wikipedia. The search giant made headlines this month when it began including links to the collaborative encyclopedia on the Google News homepage. Though some decried the move, citing the perception that Wikipedia is unreliable because anyone can edit it, Nieman Journalism Lab writer Zachary Seward and others argued that its utility is unmatched on the web.
–
You may or may not find us on Google News, but you’ll always be up to date if you follow us on Twitter.
Comments
2. Steve | 06.26.09
Do they still don’t get it or they just prefer to keep using Google as a scapegoat? The newspaper industry’s problem is that most of the site can’t get their users to pay for their product. Why? With the internet, people are not stuck with what’s published in their home town. Imagine you can choose from 1000 newspapers delivered to your door from instead of one or two. The internet opened up competition in the industry. There are just too many publishers and not enough buyers.
As for Google’s new site, people like to count the people who read the snippets or headlines and never visit the site. It’s funny they don’t mention the traffic that Google brings to their site. If a website doesn’t want Google to index their site, all they need to do is write something in their robot.txt file and Google won’t index the site. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83098 And why didn’t the news sites write a couple lines in their robot.txt and keep Google out? I assume Google still brings more traffic then they can get on their own.
3. Brooks | 06.29.09
The newspaper industy didn’t see this coming? The internet has been accessible to the average joe since when? Maybe the companies that made cassette tapes should be angry…
4. kevin | 06.30.09
maybe people will actually be able to get the real news in the near future instead of the nonsense we are spoon fed by “Corporate America”.
5. Fed Up | 07.01.09
Yes clicking through to full articles actually takes users to the new site. I would of thought this would be of benefit. The truth is Les has a problem with the aggregation side of things. Anyone heard of Factiva? get with the time Les! Your news aggregator is a dinosaur.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
Leave a Comment
We do not publish all comments, and we do not publish comments immediately. The comments feature is a forum to discuss the ideas in our stories. Constructive debate - even pointed disagreement - is welcome, but personal attacks on other commenters are not, and will not be published.
Tip: Do not write a novel. Keep it short. We will not publish lengthy comments. Come up with your own statements. This is not a place to cut and paste an email you received. If we recognize it as such, we won't post it.
Please do not post any comments that are commercial in nature or that violate copyrights.
Finally, we will not publish any comments that we regard as obscene, defamatory, or intended to incite violence.
1. Aaron Andersen | 06.26.09
It appears that the problem should only be with people who scan the Google News headlines and don’t click through to the full stories. Of course, if people click through to the content originator’s site, they will see the ads that pay to be on the content originator’s site. Same as if Google News didn’t exist, except MORE traffic. No cause for complaint, as long as people want to read the whole story.
So, for the headline surfers, how about this? Google has to allow an ad to display from an advertiser that pays the content originator. So the content originator still gets revenue, and quite possibly more then they would without Google driving traffic. And maybe Google can get a tiny slice of the payment, in consideration of the higher volume they may be generating.