Editors still clueless about Google News
The Society of Editors got together in Glasgow for their annual conference, and at least one senior editor demonstrated that he doesn’t have a clue what side of the bread his butter is on. Andrew Neil, CEO of Press Holdings Group and former Sunday Times editor, reportedly gave a rousing speech in which the dour Scot talked about how record companies and movie companies were getting their pound of flesh from Google for copyright violations, and newspapers should be talking tough and demanding the same:
We don’t charge them a penny for our hard-earned journalism… It’s time for a conversation with Google. They can afford it. Google has its pockets stashed with money - some of it we have earned.
As more than one commenter on Roy Greenslade’s blog at The Guardian noted, this is pure bollocks. Newspaper executives like Neil — and the editors of newspapers in Belgium, who have sued to have their links removed from Google News, and editors from the World Newspaper Association — talk about how Google is “stealing” their content and making money from it, all the while ignoring several crucial points:
- Google doesn’t sell ads on the Google News page, so it makes no money from those links, therefore talking about how rich Google is becomes totally irrelevant.
- Google only gives a short snippet of the text from a newspaper’s website, which is permitted by “fair use” provisions of copyright law, and provides a link to the site.
- Providing all those links helps push traffic to those sites. In other words, Google is doing newspapers a favour.
Nevertheless, editors such as Neil continue to want to either extort money from Google on the pretext that the company is “stealing” their content, or force it to remove links to them (as AFP did) and thereby cut off their nose to spite their face (Paul Bradshaw of the Online Journalism blog has a post along the same lines). Smart. Any wonder newspapers aren’t doing well?
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