Under the charming headline "Eliminate the Parasites," Newsweek's Daniel Lyons (9/12/09) advances another brilliant scheme to save corporate media from the menace of Google.

Lyons likes the idea put forward by billionaire Ayn Rand fan Mark Cuban:

Cuban's advice: declare war on the "aggregator" Web sites that get a free ride on content. These aggregators--sites like Drudge Report, Newser and countless others--don't create much original material. They mostly just synopsize stuff from mainstream newspapers and magazines, and provide a link to the original....

He says the media companies should kill off these parasites by using a little piece of software that blocks incoming links from aggregators. If the aggregators can't link to other people's stories, they die. With a few lines of code, the old-media guys could snuff them out.

Great idea--except that aggregator sites don't actually have to link to the original articles--they could just synopsize the news they find and leave searching for the original article as an exercise for the reader.  As Cuban himself notes, "very few readers actually click through to the original story," so they can't be the main attraction of the aggregators. Apparently, people go to them because they are a quick way to learn the news of the day--and they're going to keep being that, unless you make it a crime to tell people what the news is. I don't think we want to do that.

The links are mainly there as a courtesy to the content-producer, and they ought to appreciate that courtesy, because more important than the traffic that such links generate directly (though this can be quite attractive, as evidenced by outlets' relentless pursuit of Drudge links) is the fact that they boost your search-engine visibility, particularly on Google. If you stopped people from linking to you, you'd be basically invisible online. And this would be good for corporate media how?

Rather than coming up with a scheme for how to get back at Google, Huffington Post or whomever, corporate media would be better off thinking about why people use aggregator sites. When people are looking for a roundup of all the news in the world, why don't they turn to a newspaper?  And when they do click on your sites, why doesn't that make you more money? Corporate media is, after all, the business of selling audiences to advertisers--if they can't do that as well as Google does, then they just aren't very good at their jobs.

In looking at "all the angst over online appropriation of newspapers' work," Nieman Foundation blogger Zachary M. Seward (Nieman Journalism Lab, 9/4/09) thinks that "information actually flows in all directions, right?"

As "blog posts inspire newspaper articles, newspapers lift from other newspapers, and radio stations do the rip-and-read," Seward writes that "when a blogger uncovered a major zoning violation in her Brooklyn neighborhood last month, it was only natural that the New York Post would pick up the story":

But credit the blogger? That would be a violation of policy.

The Post prohibits crediting blogs and other competitors for scoops, according to the reporter, Alex Ginsberg, who noted the zoning violation two weeks after it was reported by the blogger, who calls herself Miss Heather. "Post policy prevented me from crediting you in print," Ginsberg wrote in a gracious comment on the blog. "Allow me to do so now. You did a fantastic reporting job. All I had to do was follow your steps (and make a few extra phone calls)."

The policy may have more to do with the Post's rival, the Daily News, than with blogs, but it appears to apply across the board. In an email to Miss Heather, Ginsberg wrote, "The rule is this: If every detail, fact and quote can be independently verified, then we don’t have to credit anyone."

Seward finds it "hard, of course, to defend this rule on journalistic grounds," particularly when "News Corp., which publishes the Post, has described the way Google handles its content as parasitic. How would the company describe relying on someone else's work without credit?"

Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Did Google Kill the Newspaper Star?" by Peter Hart (7/09).

I give Peter Osnos credit for not being as nutty as Richard Posner or as self-pitying as Dana Milbank; his piece from CJR on "What’s a Fair Share In the Age of Google?" (7-8/09) is the most reasonable version I've seen of the news industry's case against the search engine company. Still, I can't help but think that he's missing the point in a fundamental way.

One of Osnos' key examples of the unfairness of Google involves Sports Illustrated's website, SI.com, and a story it ran (2/7/09) on pitcher Alex Rodriguez testing positive for steroids. Osnos relates SI.com's grievance: Though it broke the story, other websites got as much or more traffic from it:

Most galling was that the Huffington Post's use of an Associated Press version of SI's report was initially tops on Google, which meant that it, and not SI.com, tended to be the place readers clicking through to get the gist of the breaking scandal would land.

From a journalist's perspective, this is patently unfair: SI.com got the scoop, and ought to get the reward. But is that the right perspective to look at what Google does?  Journalists are not, after all, in the business of creating information; they're in the business of conveying information.  Sports Illustrated's reporters did not create Rodriguez's failing steroid test results; Major League Baseball did that. People with access to the test information passed it on to SI, and SI put it up on the Web.

But that's not where the process of information transmission stops. People can't check every website that might break a news story of interest to them every day, so they rely on news gathering institutions to bring information together for them--that's what newspapers do, that's what AP does, and, yes, that's what Huffington Post does too.

Osnos attributes the Google results to the fact that "Huffington is effective at implementing search optimization techniques, which means that its manipulation of keywords, search terms, and the dynamics of Web protocol give it an advantage over others scrambling to be the place readers are sent by search engines." And it may well be that the folks at HuffPo are better at that stuff than SI is--though you'd think with the $84 billion entity of Time Warner behind them, the sports mag could afford to figure it out.

More important for HuffPo's search results, however, is the fact that people who use the Web have gotten used to looking for breaking news there, and so when they link to a story they find interesting they link to it there. Google's methodology, looking for links as a surrogate for how people use the Web, finds more of them going to Huffington Post than to SI.com--and that's why HuffPo came out on top.

Osnos says that "human help" needs to be incorporated into Google's algorithm--given that the search engine last year announced that it had indexed more than 1 trillion urls, this suggestion would seem to be rather impractical. But it's not clear that the human-free algorithm is making the wrong choice by directing Web surfers to the sites people most often go to when looking for information.

Considering how, "in recent months, news aggregators like the Huffington Post have received heated criticism from some who believe they’re stealing valuable traffic and ad revenue from newspapers," with even "appeals court Judge Richard Posner recently wr[iting] a widely-linked post arguing that copyright law should be changed in order to bar linking to websites and paraphrasing their content," media blogger Simon Owens (Bloggasm.com, 7/6/09) has conducted an experiment to evaluate the premise of corporate media management "that news aggregators simply repackage news so there’s little incentive to click on the actual link":

So how much traffic does a large news aggregator like Huffington Post bring? I’ve been linked several times within Huffington Post, but typically on its users blogs, which only send a few hundred readers at most. But on early Friday I was fortunate enough to be featured prominently on Huffington Post’s front page with a banner headline linking to one of my articles.

How much traffic did this link bring? Lots. For the first three hours I received approximately 4,000 unique visitors an hour to just that one article. Traffic for the rest of the day remained strong, not once dipping below 2,000 uniques an hour as the link began traveling down the front page. By midnight that night, Huffington Post had sent approximately 30,000 unique visitors to that one article.

But though the first day’s worth of traffic was the heaviest, the Huffington Post continued to send me strong traffic for two more days as the link moved down on its main page but remained prominent on its highly-trafficked Politics page.

"All together," Owens tells us, he "received a grand total of 37,739 unique visitors from a prominent link on the Huffington Post over a three day period," while days later "still seeing relatively strong traffic from there"--which all sounds like decidedly good news for linked-to big media outlets, doesn't it?

Corporate media's arguments against Google are getting stranger and stranger. While previously the Washington Post had accused the search engine of "vacuum[ing] up their content without paying a dime," now the Post has media lawyers Bruce Sanford and Bruce Brown (5/16/09) charging that search engines "crawl the Web and ingest everything in their path."

Can anything be done to stop these terrifying monsters?  Yes, the two Bruces say--you could change the law to require search engines to "obtain copyright permissions in order to copy and index websites." Given that the point of this would be to force search engines to "negotiate with copyright holders over the value of their content"--that is, with millions of copyright holders located all over the world--this would likely eliminate all problems associated with search engines...by eliminating search engines.  Then I'm sure we'd have a golden age of journalism once again.

We've written about this before, but today (5/11/09) the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz turned in another example of journalists who seem to believe Google is what's killing their industry. Responding to talks between his employer and Google about some sort of collaboration, Kurtz writes:

Hanging over the talks is the reality that the search giant, while funneling vital traffic to news sites, vacuums up their content without paying a dime.

I'm not sure what it is that Google is accused of "vacuuming." Kurtz is likely referring to Google News, which lets users search many media outlets at once. The main Google News page features the headlines of what the search engine determines to be popular stories, sometimes with the first sentence or so of the accompanying article. Anyone who wants to read the full article can follow a link to the news site itself.

By way of analogy, for years most daily newspapers--including the Washington Post--have include a page of TV listings, giving the titles and air times of programs one might want to watch. Sometimes they go further and offer a plot summary; other times the paper will tell me that a given movie is terrible. Does all of this amount to stealing from the TV stations, since the newspaper profits from the ads it sells next to these listings? I wouldn't think so, but I'm not sure how what Google does is all that different.

In a column attacking Google and other "accused newspaper industry killers," the Washington Post's Dana Milbank (5/7/09) doesn't present much of an argument for why newspapers are dying--but he provides an excellent example of why journalism like his deserves to die.

[Marissa] Mayer, who oversees Google News, explained how "Google is doing its part" to preserve journalism--by keeping the lion's share of ad revenue before directing readers to newspaper sites. "Google News and Google search provide a valuable service to online newspapers specifically by sending interested readers to their sites," she said.

Oh? Let's plug in "Senate Commerce Committee 'Future of Journalism' hearing" into Google News and see what comes up. After a link to a wire story, the second headline is "Google's Mayer to Dispense Advice to Newspapers at Senate Hearing."

One obvious feature of journalism that's worth preserving is that it makes sense, which this passage clearly does not.  What is the relevance of the fact that a headline about Google comes up when you do a Google News search on a hearing whose most newsworthy aspects include a Google executive's testimony?  It seems unlikely that Milbank is advancing a conspiracy theory that Google is rigging its search results to get more publicity for itself, because he plainly thinks Mayer's testimony was newsworthy as well.

Milbank instead seems to be saying that this link turning up somehow disproves Mayer's contention that Google News provides as "valuable service to online newspapers"--but how does it disprove this, exactly? The link goes to a Wall Street Journal blog post--and the Journal is presumably happy to have Google sending people to it, because the Journal gets paid every time someone sees the ad sitting next to the post.

The one intelligible point that Milbank makes here is his complaint that Google is "keeping the lion's share of ad revenue before directing readers to newspaper sites."  Yes, it does--it does keep most of the revenue that it gets for selling ads on its own website, revenue that would not exist if Google did not exist.  That's wrong, in the eyes of Milbank and other self-pitying newspaper pundits,  because Google is getting paid to find things that belong to newspapers.  It's not fair!  You can almost hear Milbank's foot stamping the floor.

This is unpersuasive on a few counts.  For one thing, quoting newspaper headlines and a minimal amount of text, as Google does, is plainly fair use--anyone has the right to do this without asking the newspaper owner's permission or paying them anything.  FAIR often quotes Milbank's copy--generally to point out how inaccurate, misleading or servilely devoted to power it is--and we're not about to start paying him for the privilege. Google has no more obligation to pay newspapers for directing Internet users to their stories than tour guides have to pay the owners of the landmark buildings they point out.  Or, for that matter, than newspapers are required to pay newsmakers for creating the events that newspapers profit from reporting.

But Google, as we've pointed out before, does not rely on what would seem to be a strong fair use claim; it allows newspapers to opt out of Google News by adding a simple line of code to their websites.  If the Washington Post thinks it's being killed by Google News, it can immediately stop Google News from directing readers to it. Clearly, the Post doesn't want to do that--it wants Google to keep sending readers to the it, and it wants Google to send it a great big check as well.  That's not the way the capitalist system works, but you can understand why Dana Milbank wishes it were.

Maureen Dowd today (New York Times, 4/15/09) writes about the newspaper industry's complaints about Google:

Robert Thomson, the top editor of the Wall Street Journal, denounced websites like Google as "tapeworms." His boss, Rupert Murdoch, said that big newspapers do not have to let Google "steal our copyrights." The AP has threatened to take legal action against Google and others that use the work of news organizations without obtaining permission and sharing a "fair" portion of revenue. But what's fair will be hard to prove.

First of all, Google is not stealing anyone's copyrights; quoting the headline and a small bit of text to indicate what various news organizations are reporting about is clearly covered by the fair use exemption to copyright laws.

But Google, rather than insisting on the inherent right that we all have to quote minor amounts of copyrighted material, allows news outlets to opt out of Google News by adding a simple line of code to their websites.  Dowd's piece cites Google CEO Eric Schmidt pointing out that "newspapers could opt out of giving their content to Google free." Apparently they must think they get more from Google linking to them than from Google not linking from them.
So if Google has a right to quote the newspapers' material, and the newspapers see such quotation as beneficial to themselves, why should Google volunteer to write big checks to the newspapers?  Well, because the papers would like to get free money.  And who wouldn't?