Newspapers Fight Back
We've commented from time to time on the financial crisis besetting newspapers and most other print media. This long article in USA Today provides an excellent overview:
"I don't think I've ever seen the sense of innovation and willingness to take risks that I'm seeing now," says John Kimball, chief marketing officer of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA)."Across the industry the message I pick up is, 'Oh my God. It's slipping away. What can I do?' " says Stephen Gray, managing director of the initiative, called Newspaper Next. The answer, he says, will require "a shift of thought from, 'How do we get people to read more newspapers?' to 'What problems are people trying to solve in their lives, and how can we help?'"
It's not hard to see why newspapers are concerned:
Growing uncertainty about newspaper companies' prospects contributed to a 20% decline in the collective value of newspaper company stocks in 2005.
Newspapers are expanding rapidly onto the web and into other non-traditional media like podcasting--the "News & Politics" section of podcasts on iTunes is a real eye-opener--but it remains to be seen whether these ventures can replace the profits being lost in print.
In the meantime, newspapers are fighting back. This intensely interesting article in yesterday's Financial Times describes complaints by newspapers and other content providers against Google and other on-line aggregators:
A group of newspaper, magazine and book publishers is accusing Google and other aggregators of online news stories of unfairly exploiting their content. They are demanding compensation from search engines.Gavin O’Reilly, the president of the World Association of Newspapers, which is co-ordinating the campaign, said on Tuesday: “We need search engines, and they do help consumers navigate an increasingly complicated medium, but they’re building [their business] on the back of kleptomania.”
The group of publishers, which includes the International Publishers’ Association, the European Federation of Magazine Publishers and Agence France Presse, is seeking meetings with Charlie McCreevy, the European Union’s internal market commissioner, and Viviane Reding, the commissioner responsible for media. It would not rule out legal action to enforce copyright or “collective action”, Mr O’Reilly said. “Ultimately, the aggregators need the content providers.”
I found this admission rather stunning:
Services such as Google News link to original news stories on the home pages of newspapers and magazines and display only the headline and one paragraph of the story. “That’s often enough” for readers browsing the top stories, Mr O’Reilly said.
The same complaint could be made against bloggers, of course, since we often quote the key paragraphs from the articles we link to, and many readers don't follow the links:
The growth of online news aggregators has coincided with an acceleration in the long-term trend of declining readership for print newspapers and a shift in advertising spending from print to the internet, much of which is not being captured by the newspapers’ own sites.
The newspapers reject any suggestion that they are simply whining because they are not winning in the current marketplace:
Mr O’Reilly likened the initiative to the conflict between the music industry and illegal file-sharing websites and said it was not a sign that publishers had failed to create a competitive online business model of their own.“I think newspapers have developed very compelling web portals and news channels but the fact here is that we’re dealing with basic theft,” he said.
At the end of the day, of course, there is no doubt that commentary sites like this one and aggregators like Google and Yahoo rely on other media to do original news gathering. Ultimately, the newspapers and other news media who fulfill this function need to develop a business model that will work in an era of mostly electronic communication. If they don't, the demand for raw news will be filled by someone else.
