Interesting article in the Economist this week about increasing tensions between traditional media outlets and Google, whose News service the papers say is costing them ad revenue. The battle has been taken to legislatures in Germany and Italy, where news outlets are seeking copyright protection for the small excerpts used by Google News, claiming that readers are less likely to click through to the article (and by extension, subscribe to paid subscriptions) because of Google's free excerpts. Google claims that this fear is unfounded, citing that 4 billions click-throughs occur each month. Also lending some support to the idea that Google's not the source of the papers' woes is the example of Brazil, where 150 papers opted out of Googel News aggregation and the site only experienced a 5% bump in traffic. Google does not post ads on its Google News search results pages.
I tend to sympathize with the article's argument that the real problem is the decline of traditional media. It would seem to me that a far bigger threat to traditional newspapers is the rise of blogging, not Google News, and alternative news sources like the Huffington Post or partisan news sources like The Drudge Report, and entertainment sources like the Onion AV Club or New York Magazine's Vulture blog.
Growing up every week I would look forward to Friday's Boston Globe plopping down on the doorstep, so that I could read the movie reviews. I made all my decisions based on the opinion of the Globe's reviewer. Can you imagine in this day and age relying on a single movie review, rather than Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes, to tell you what to fork over your hard-earned allowance for? (Let alone one arbitrarily assigned to you by geography?) The web has changed media irrevocably, offering more selection than we could have ever dreamed of. Traditional outlets try to change, but they also try to hold onto their turf for as long as possible. No matter the outcome of these Google laws, their days remain numbered.
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