April 19, 2009

Editors to Google: It is your fault! But the editors are wrong

I don't understand why editors of serious newspapers cannot stand news aggregators in general and Google News in particular. Two examples: 1) Today's editorial in Dagens Nyheter by Peter Wolodarski. 2) Kauppalehti's Editor-in-Chief Hannu Leinonen focusing the interview of Petri Kokko, Head of Google Finland, at SIME Helsinki last fall on Google News.

For whatever it's worth, Google News is not the interesting thing about Google and is not the reason newspapers make less money on a competitive Internet than they did 25 years ago with local newspaper monopolies.

On the web you want to be linked to as links bring traffic, and traffic is the foundation for advertising revenue. Using a sentence or two to describe something when linking to it is not an evil form of parasitism, but rather a symbiotic relationship more akin to mycorrhiza.

2 comments:

pni said...

Why don't the media houses just ban Google from their sites? It's not technically very challenging and that would keep the 'leeches' from linking to their content.

Well, without Google the media houses wouldn't just lose the income they get from showing ads, they'd also lose a potential monetary milking cow: who would they sue for extra income, if Google wasn't linking to them?

It's a tricky thing.

Judith said...

2 * stuff

1) interesting thoughts! totally agree
1) thanks for blog-congratulations

:D