A newspaper whines about Google. I hear crickets.
Brian spotted an editorial in the Seattle Times published yesterday (Nov. 20, 2008), noting the dominance of Google in online advertising – and celebrating the failure of an advertising deal between Google and Yahoo! For Brian, the curiosity was a media company complaining publicly about Google. For me, the curiosity was that he read a newspaper editorial.
Anonymous, patronizing, word-of-God newspaper editorials baffled me when there was no web. Today, baffle would be an overstatement. They don’t even tickle, like fuzz under my nose. Maybe they hum imperceptibly, like the background radiation still echoing from the Big Bang – evidence of something long ago and far away. Or they float, odorless, tasteless, invisible, like carbon monoxide. Poison. Gas. They are a sad waste of paper, ink and electrons – a carbon emission that should be curbed.
Still, I read this one and discovered another curiosity: shameless, simplistic self-interest. Which I might celebrate and applaud if the author had the balls to put their name against it. The editorial, author unknown, from a family-owned newspaper in Microsoft’s home town, repeated an old gripe of newspaper owners around the world: that Google has stolen their content and gotten rich off their backs.
The World Association of Newspapers, which represents publishers (and with which I’m affiliated as a board member of its World Editor’s Forum), promotes a system called ACAP to try to build business rules into web content. In other words, to try to give publishers greater control over who uses their content – and who pays for it. The Seattle Times editorial doesn’t get into this kind of nitty-gritty detail, or provide any background or data to substantiate its quip that “Google is getting rich packaging content owned by magazines and newspapers and not paying for it.” It fails to note that anyone who wants to opt out of Google’s database is free to do so.
The story of news content, value and Google is complex – news has been devalued in the age of the digital everything, and Google plays a dominant role in that story. Google has also produced revenue for newspapers through its advertising services, and the search giant drives millions of readers to newspaper web sites.
A simplistic, biased, pseudo-authoritative declaration of good and evil from a newspaper that should be doing everything in its power to earn the trust and respect of its community (for instance, by acknowledging its business interests and inherent conflict in covering the business of news; or by attaching names and allowing people to know from whom such simpleton ideas spew), reminds me why I no longer pay attention to newspaper editorials.
Wow! I really hope the newspapers figure out that the time is nigh and they need get a new business model. Content is King for sure, but there has to be some blood and new ideas pumped into these old models. Seriously, get rid of the infrastructure and determine the true, not perceived value of product. Oh yeah and quit blaming Google.
Er, editorials never have specific authors. It’s the opinion of the newspaper as a whole, not of one specific person. Otherwise, it would be a column.
Not saying your point’s not valid, just that your complaint about an author not being named isn’t really valid.
Actually, I’m resurrecting an old debate. Newspapers have a long tradition of unsigned editorials posing as the “official” position of the newspaper. Some newspapers have also ditched that form in favor of signed editorials – and some, like the The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, have gone back and forth. That newspaper ditched anonymous editorials in 1994, and brought them back in 2004.
The British Medical Journal dropped most anonymous editorials in 1981.
U.S. newspapers in particular suffer a serious trust gap – and top-down, authoritarian practices in an age of expanding transparency and open debate won’t help them regain the trust of their communities. Some publishers, editors and editorial writers may cherish the ruse of authority and wisdom they seem to attach to their “official” groupthink. I don’t and I see little evidence that readers with more access to more ideas and information than ever before feel compelled to trust writers who can’t even sign their names to their opinions which, in the tiny example I cited here, may be poorly researched, unsubstantiated and not worth the paper they were printed on.