Over on The Wall Street Journal they ran a piece that was Eric Schmidt’s response (How Google Can Help Newspapers) to the accusations from Rupert Murdoch and the print industry. The print industry claims Google is pirating their content to make a profit and giving little in return. Here’s some of the best parts:
“With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame. Much of their anger is currently directed at Google, whom many executives view as getting all the benefit from the business relationship without giving much in return. The facts, I believe, suggest otherwise.”
It’s always interesting how companies as well as people who fail to adapt look for someone to blame for their own inabilities.
“It’s understandable to look to find someone else to blame. But as Rupert Murdoch has said, it is complacency caused by past monopolies, not technology, that has been the real threat to the news industry.”
And the argument that Google is not giving anything back is just not true.
“Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free. In terms of copyright, another bone of contention, we only show a headline and a couple of lines from each story. If readers want to read on they have to click through to the newspaper’s Web site. (The exception are stories we host through a licensing agreement with news services.) And if they wish, publishers can remove their content from our search index, or from Google News.”
Schmidt’s article strengthens the simple fact that if newspapers and magazines don’t learn to adapt and embrace today’s technology they will fail. Only by incorporating technology will they survive.
“Nor is there a choice, as some newspapers seem to think, between charging for access to their online content or keeping links to their articles in Google News and Google Search. They can do both.”
