Google chief lectures newspapers
As he destroys them
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According to non-journalist, non-publisher, non-newsman Eric Schmidt, newspapers just don't understand their own business.
As reported by the Guardian, Google's CEO has joined the chorus of Cassandras crying out that tree-based news delivery is doomed.
"It's obvious to me that the majority of the circulation of a newspaper should be online, rather than printed. There should be five times, 10 times more circulation because there's no distribution cost," he said.
Exactly how to use online distribution to pay for news bureaus filled with the reporters needed to ferret out news and present it in a cogent, contextualized manner, Schmidt didn't say.
As The New York Times discovered with its ill-fated TimesSelect online-subscription experiment, charging readers to read web articles isn't the answer.
But the care and feeling of a cadre of ink-stained wretches isn't a concern of Schmidt's. His site doesn't uncover news. It aggregates the stuff. Google makes money from the work of news organizations' reporters, writers, and analysts.
Which is exactly what's pissing off actual newsmen such as Associated Press chairman Dean Singleton, who said at his organization's annual meeting this week in San Diego, California, that: "We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories."
The Wall Street Journal's managing editor, Robert Thomson, was an order of magnitude more blunt when he told The Australian: "There is no doubt that certain websites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet."
If there were any doubt about what Thomson meant by "certain websites," it was dispelled when he said: "It's certainly true that readers have been socialised - wrongly I believe - that much content should be free. And there is no doubt that's in the interest of aggregators like Google who have profited from that mistaken perception."
Schmidt, though, sees the challenge to newspapers as merely a matter of marketing. On Tuesday, he told the Newspaper Association of America's annual meeting, also in San Diego, that "I would encourage everybody: think in terms of what your reader wants."
You can just imagine the resulting sound of thousands of palms striking thousands of foreheads as the assembled newsmen thought, "Why didn't I think of that?! What a dialed-in, cyber-savvy, cutting-edge innovator!"
Actually, it's more likely that they thought something more along the line of the deep distaste that greeted Facebook's enfant terrible, Mark Zuckerberg, when he famously declaimed to a similar group last year that "Once every hundred years, media changes."
Namely, "Who is this fricking frack, and what the frick does he fracking know about the fricking news business?"
Or some such. ®
COMMENTS
@AC 20:08
Wow buddy, you got some pretty screwed up ideas of what socialism is.
Obviously somewhere you got "capitalism," "anarchy" and "good thing" all cross-wired in your brain. While at the same time “socialism” “dictatorship” and “rape everyone” got all cross-wired too. See a shrink. Or maybe a political scientist trained somewhere other than a hard-core republican state.
I weep for our species, that it has people in it that believe as you do. Until then, I am going to go enjoy living in a country that is at least partially sane. Thank you very much sir, honestly, a HUGE amount.
Sometimes, I despair of my country, and its slow slide towards greedy corporatism, because of fool anarchists who think that without any government, they would be better off. (Oh yes, because without a government of some king, the dude with the biggest rock didn't start bashing people over the head until he FORMED a government. One nation squirming under his boot.) Oh, and in case you start bawwwwwing about how your anarcho-capitalist leanings are only Darwinistic and thus good, I would like to point out to you that you are very wrong. Homo Sapiens is a PACK ANIMAL, not a solitary uber-predator. Without the pack, we’re pretty pathetic. As soon as you have a pack, you have an alpha. As soon as you have an alpha, you have a form of government. Survival of he with the most friends bearing pointy sticks.
No matter how far my nation and our unfortunate cousins to the south have slipped, (and continue to slip,) we're still better off than if we were run by you.
Thank all the deities, random cosmic events, luck, skill, the giant marshmallow man, and Paris Hilton for that.
Amen.
Trevor Pott ~~~ Government Monopolies, Regulations, and Socialists
Tevor ~~~ "Go AT&...oh wait."
They were a government monopoly, not a free-market company.
Tevor ~~~ "Enro....damn."
Another example of big government in the United States. Regulated out of business.
Trevor ~~~ "Banks. The banks have to be something I can believe in! Go banks!"
Once again, the government under former President Jimmy Carter passed laws allowing for Socialist groups like ACORN to extort the banks into providing loans which people who would normally not qualify for loans. Ironic that it has taken about 30 years (the time of a typical U.S. mortgage loan) for the deck of cards to come falling down.
Trevor ~~~ "What, what you say? Corruption, greed, and shady practices resulted in a planetary financial meltdown?"
Yep. Corruption, greed, and shady practices due to socialists and communists. The same type of meltdown happened in the U.S.S.R.
Trevor ~~~ "You mean to say that unregulated and unrestrained corporatism ends up apocalyptically bad for everyone but the tiny few in power? Well, who would ever have known?"
Yep. A large group of socialists in positions of power always cause destruction.
Trevor ~~~ "Giving a bonus to a corporatist is like tipping a rapist."
Corporatists are little more than Socialists.
@Mike Flugennock: @AC 9th April 2009 08:57 GMT
Anonymous says, "If the news papers were not so socialist in nature, the internet web sites would not be killing them off, since there would be no socialist beliefs. The left leaning news media had promoted socialism, after socialism was shown to be the bane of the Western World"
Mike Flugennock says, "Let me guess... you followed this link from the Drudge Report."
The Drudge Report is a leftward leaning web site.
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/Media-Bias-Is-Real-Finds-UCLA-6664.aspx?RelNum=6664
Why would someone complaining about leftward leaning media come from a posting on a leftward leaning internet site???
That is very odd reasoning...
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