DISQUS

Adam Singer · 8 months ago

Essentially the AP is looking to lock up it's news. Apparently they have learned nothing from watching the public teardown of any remaining relevance of the RIAA and the music industry and their attempts to lockup their content.

What they both have in common is they are trying to bend the web to their whim, as if they are so important special rules should be made to accommodate them. That approach is fundamentally flawed from step one. We should not be making any special rules to accommodate organizations designed for a previous era. This is the antithesis of progress and creating systems that work at scale.

Economic growth is not had from bailing out or making special accommodations for the gatekeepers of yesterday, but in investing in innovative new players who create products that are relevant, interesting and useful to a modern world.

Restricting networks that are by design open is two steps backwards and harms everyone at the benefit of the few. Mitch Joel points us to a talk between Thomas Curley (President and Chief Executive Officer of the Associated Press) along with Arianna Huffington (from The Huffington Post). It's at: http://www.twistimage.com/blog/archives/trying-.... Go watch it if you have a minute. What I got out of it? The AP wants to reinstate their position as king in a world they have been dethroned. It appears to me they want to try and do this through a form of "news DRM"

The core problem with DRM, content restriction, lawsuits, paralleling pre-Internet models, and a "head in the sand" approach is that they ignore the bigger opportunity: building something to take advantage of open networks.

Louis Gray · 8 months ago

The Web thrives on openness, and unfortunately for many, free. If you can find one option that gets you the data you want faster, cheaper, better, it will win. Newspapers do not have the edge on speed, on price or convenience.

Mlloyd · 8 months ago

You can't make the comparison using just Google News as the news representative of Google, you have to include the Google search engine. In fact, you should focus on the Google search engine and 'include' Google News. If I want to learn about the Miracle on the Hudson, I don't go to CNN/NYT/Chicago Trib/etc...I google Miracle on the Hudson and go where Google sends me.

Google isn't controlling content at all, this isn't about Google stealing a few lines of an article, or it shouldn't be anyway. It's about Google controlling the distribution of the eyes on the internet. In the past, if you wanted news you read the morning paper. Now, you Google whatever is of interest. If you think Google cares where the content is hosted you still don't get their business model. All Google cares about is that you go through them to get to whatever you're looking for, that's their revenue model. They sell ads based on people using them to find everything else, news included. It's the same model the newspapers have in the physical world and it works and would continue to work if the eyes weren't leaving the medium.

You are correct though wrt Yahoo and content. They are the most highly trafficked portal site in the world (I think?), they specialize in delivering content, their business model is different. They don't want you to leave the Yahoo domain, Google is sending you away with best wishes, just make sure you view the ads before you leave.

Louis Gray · 8 months ago

I once thought my future would be as a newspaper reporter. I wrote for the college paper, covering crime and city council. While I was in college, I was excited to see the move to online and was reading papers from around the world. But trying to gain the revenue online that is lost from print is practically impossible. Google search is not killing newspapers. It's the portals and the real-time news sources that make newspapers irrelevant and late.

Mlloyd · 8 months ago

"But trying to gain the revenue online that is lost from print is practically impossible."

So maybe they should stop trying to continue being huge and try and figure how they can survive? Find a niche, build it out and if it's good...you'll live to grow. If not, God Bless...

The papers are ultimately responsible for their fate here, they were slow to catch on and now they pay the price but they can still find a way out, they just need to divorce themselves from the old ways and move ahead in a smaller, more nimble way.

Ari Herzog · 8 months ago

Let's be fair here. When you talk about newspapers, you mean the giants: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, Le Monde. They are shifting because of advertisers seeking cheaper real estate online. But if you trickle down into the smaller presses, journalism is going anywhere but down. Sure, you'll flip through a barrage of ads and cartoons in the local weekly rag, but this means you'll also get prolific content and more-than-measly-paid freelancers.

Google, Yahoo, blah blah. Online media and ratings change every month. But the local presses continue; this is where the big boys should investigate to determine how to emulate. Don't trickle down; trickle up.

robdiana · 8 months ago

Ari,

You bring up a good point. The smaller papers, which are not the topic here, are doing whatever they can to stay alive. This could be due to being smaller, they may be more open to change.

guruvan · 8 months ago

This is the case in any industry with huge players and tiny competitors. The little companies are the sources of innovation and change, and the large companies take forever to a) take notice and b) develop similar strategies or buy up the smaller companies. This will happen in the print news delivery over time. It consistently happens in the telecom and general tech markets, and has been happening in the video programming market as well. Television is evolving faster than print media, but it's a much newer business. You are absolutely correct in your assertion that the newspapers are killing themselves. It's certainly not Google and Yahoo! killing them.

Louis Gray · 8 months ago

Post by Rob Diana: http://www.friendfeed.com/robdiana

Wilma Stoneflint · 8 months ago

I think newspapers have actually done a decent job of evolving through things like CNN. Also, I think, on the whole, newspaper web sites are generally quite good. Remember, if you turn newspapers into web sites, they are not newspapers anymore. Print on paper is a compelling format..

John E. Bredehoft · 8 months ago

(I commented on the robdiana feed.)

Stan Scott · 8 months ago

I was reading a NY Times article today, about the Pritzker architecture award presented to an obscure Swiss architect. It included NO pictures, nothing I could see, about a man the NYT admitted most people knew nothing about. This is "old style" journalism.

John Taube · 8 months ago

Much of the same can be said for print publishing of books as well.

Stan Scott · 8 months ago

No, John. Can you imagine a book on architecture prizes and the people who won them WITHOUT any pictures of their buildings? I can't.

carloslorenzo · 8 months ago

I totally agree on this. In Spain, one of the most important newspapers, El Pais, leads online editions and brags about its commitment with new technologies but as you say they just limit themselves to reproduce the paper edition online and little more. The rest of newspapers are way behind. But none of this is enough and neither they draw loyal paper readers online nor they capture internet fresh news addicts into their digital edition on the web. I suppose they have this transition dilemma and as you mention above any change is scary. Traditional newspapers rely upon an outdated mechanism of administrative red tape. The process to hire qualified personnel to cope with the new reality is too slow or simply does not exist since in most cases their policy is dictated by the same old tycoons, the same monopolies whose mentality is still very retrograde to understand the new trends. People like Rupert Murdoch, the Grahams of The Washington Post, the Sulzbergers of The New York Times, Robert Maxwell, etc. Wonderful post Rob. Thanks Louis.

John Taube · 8 months ago

It just seems that book publishers are at risk of going down the same path as the record industry by not looking for ways to make the new environment work and spending a lot of time defending their actions.

Alex Schleber · 8 months ago

Judging from recent appearances by several newspaper "luminaries", denial is not just a river in Egypt :) ..theirs runs DEEP.

DGentry · 8 months ago

I don't think its for lack of trying. In the 90s a number of newpapers (including my local San Jose Mercury News) tied their print product to online discussion groups on AOL. The New York Times had a fax edition, which gradually became an email edition. The Wall Street Journal has an online, paid edition.

The problem they have is the same problem many industries have: the new technology destroys the old revenue stream quickly, and then gradually grows its own revenue well below what the old business model provided. Online delivery eliminated most distribution costs, bringing in competitors which drove the value of news below what newspapers need to survive in their current form. This happens over and over: Kodak did not sit idly by while digital cameras took over, they jumped into digital technology early and with significant investment but were still badly burned by the drop in film revenue.

The AP is now in the endgame, trying to hold back the ocean. I don't think its for lack of trying, its that everything they tried has failed.