Earth to newspapers: YOU have a problem

I’m fed up with people moaning about how Google inter alia is busy screwing money out of the hard work of poor, suffering newspapers (latest spiel on the subject – and excuse for this rant – on AB.com today).

Others have written about this, and probably done it more comprehensively, but sod it, it’s pissing me off.

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, the thesis runs something like this: newspapers spend a lot of money on producing news – they train and employ reporters, hire sub-editors and designers and photographers, and knock their pipes out putting together.

Then Google comes along and steals – STEALS – it for nothing, and makes a fat wodge by sticking ads next to it. How shocking and terrible is that?

Well, it’s not. It’s balls, frankly.

In fairness to Ann Woolner’s piece, cited above, she does note – as many fail to – that Google doesn’t actually display the news on its own site; instead, and crucially, it redirects traffic to the newspaper’s own website.

All a Google News reader gets from Google News itself, is a headline and short snippet of the story, along with a link to the original page. (There are some exceptions to this, such as Associated Press content, which Google pays to use on its own domain.)

So, unless it’s otherwise paid for it, Google simply redirects traffic THAT MIGHT NOT OTHERWISE HAVE GONE THERE to a newspaper’s website, where it is free to sell ads, sponsorship or whatever, and make a buck.(Oh, and incidentally, there are no ads on Google News pages. How about that?)

So what’s the problem?

The reason that there’s so much handwringing and assorted wailing about the Google News issue is because newspapers screwed up when it came to the web. In the early days of teh intarwebs, papers saw their websites as a minor adjunct to their (often very lucrative) print operations.

At some point, someone came up with the bright idea of putting content online – gives people another channel to look at the paper, increases mindshare, gets it noticed. All that sort of thing. Great.

And of course this was fine – as long as people still kept buying papers. Fast forward a few years (that would be now), and people are getting more and more news off the web, and less and less from the expensive bundle of recycled paper and rags on the newsstands.

Newspapers never anticipated this – and in fairness, it wasn’t necessarily the most obvious problem.

Papers have always had a relatively low cost of acquisition – the price under the masthead is nowhere near the real cost of putting the physical paper in your hands, but merely an attempt to defray some of that expense. As we all know, the real money comes from those nice colourful ads inside – and those lovely classified ads at the back.

So when they went online, and could put the content in front of people without spending a fortune on news print, why should it occur to papers to charge?

But just as print circulations (and with them the advertising revenue) declined, and web use soared, papers discovered that online ad sales were never going to make up for that lost print revenue. And then eBay, Craigslist and others took all the classified cash as well.

Oh, bollocks.

So what to do? Do papers accept the inevitable, take a deep breath, and restructure their businesses?

Or do they try and sue everyone in sight, starting with Google? Hey, guess what.

So now we have a lot of whiny op-ed pieces in emotive language, all blaming Google, and some shaky lawsuits based on technicalities of copyright law (Google holds copyrighted material on its servers, therefore it’s breaking the law – despite the fact that it references and DIRECTS TRAFFIC TO the original source).

Despite her own nicely emotive language, Woolmer actually makes half a sensible suggestion in her piece: papers need to withdraw from Google News, and they need to do it together, not one by one.

(Then she goes and suggests the US government should intervene – but at least she was half-way there.)

Like it or not, papers need to start charging for their online content – just as some such as The Economist, or the Middle East Economic Digest here, already do. And this isn’t just about papers – it affects pure online news sources, such as AdNation, as well.

Thanks to that early mistake by papers, the expectation is that information on the web is free – and it is not.

But unlike music or movies or TV shows, news sources are in a much better position to control access to their precious content – no one will much care about two-day-old news; the value comes from having it here, now.

The Middle East is so far not suffering as badly as the west – people still buy papers and magazines here, and the internet is still niche, in many respects.

But this just means we should start figuring out how to deal with this problem NOW – and not when our publications are all facing bankruptcy and need to be bailed out by Mexican billionaires.

The first step to recovery, they say, is admitting you have a problem: papers need to admit that the problem is THEIRS, of their own making, and Google just took advantage of what was in front of it.