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.
