Note: I originally wrote this for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer
News publishers have been begging and/or threatening Google for the better part of a decade now, trying to convince the company to compensate them for the news that it carries in its search products. And for all of those years, Google has been adamantly refusing to do so — until now, that is. On Thursday, the search giant announced that it is launching a new product later this year focused on “high quality” news, and as part of that, it will be paying a select group of publishers in a number of countries for access to their content, including access to news stories that sit behind paywalls. According to a number of news reports, the company has already signed deals with leading media outlets in Germany, Australia, and Brazil, including Schwartz Media, Diarios Associados, and Der Spiegel. Google hasn’t said whether it is negotiating with or has signed agreements with any US-based publishers.
Google’s blog post on the announcement, and tweets by chief executive Sundar Pichai, tried to make it sound as though this is just another in a long line of helping hands the company has offered to the media industry. Google News vice-president Brad Bender said it would “build on the value we already provide through search and our ongoing efforts with the Google News Initiative,” and Pichai said “for decades we have worked with publishers to grow audiences and build value [and] we continue that progress today.” And it’s true that the Google News Initiative has given journalists, media companies, and industry groups tens of millions of dollars. But it’s also true that Google has never paid publishers directly for news, and has vowed repeatedly it would never do so (its argument has always been that it sends publishers traffic, and that this should be as good as money). When Spain tried to force it to pay, Google removed the country from its News service, and during the European Union’s discussion of new copyright legislation, hinted it might do the same for the EU.
As CJR pointed out in a feature on the more than $500 million in funding that Google and Facebook have provided to the media industry, what eventually became the Google News Initiative started as a way of placating news publishers in Belgium and France who were upset at having their content “stolen” by the search company. After being targeted by lawsuits and regulatory pressure, Google promised to help publishers figure out how to use the internet to monetize their content through ads and subscriptions, as opposed to having Google pay them, and it created a fund in both countries to help finance such efforts via grants and fellowship programs. The funding was rolled into the Digital News Initiative in 2015, and then it and the Google News Lab were combined and renamed the Google News Initiative in 2018.
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