[...] the rest of this post at the Nieman Journalism Lab) [...]

You: If the effect is the same as private-labeling when people Google the news, then the news provider has failed to do their job.

Me: Would you take that further and agree that, if a news provider depends on Google for its audience, it is failing to do its job?

You: Yes, I would agree with that.

Me: Then we’re not that far apart! I’m saying that news providers need to prove that independence. We just differ on the means.

For people who prefer it in the original Twitter:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=dtunkelang+mathewi

[...] För den som ändå vill ha en förklaring till varför de har fel kan till exempel läsa det här koncisa inlägget i debatten eller något av Jeff [...]

And @Terry, I realize the headline on the post seems a little definitive — I was going for impact, not trying to sound arrogant :-)

[...] Nieman Journalism Lab: Hey, moron newspaper people, you need Google  more than Google needs you. [...]

Here’s how…
1) Before Google, the internet was harder to use, and less people used it for less stuff. Concomitantly, in this pre-Google world, newspapers were still creating a lot of unique value. Their grip was slipping, but as a primary information source, print still had an arguable competitive advantage versus the web. Moreover, because print newspapers served as the choke point through which so much news and information passed, they were able to extract exorbitant revenue from advertisers. News and information was scarce––newspapers eased that scarcity, and thereby created value.

2) Once Google hit the web, the internet became A LOT better and more useful. Google killed the newspaper as a person’s primary source of news & information, both by putting newspapers in competition with each other and by putting an infinitely larger pool of content and & information at the user’s fingertips. Google ended the scarcity of useful information on the internet and in the world. In doing so, they made the world a much better place, but killed off the scarcity that was newspapers’ source of competitive advantage and profitability.

My point here is that Google changed the news and information ecosystem, and it is these changes that are killing the newspaper industry. However, now that the world has changed, there’s just no going back, Robots.txt file or no.

3) In sum…Google: Bad for newspapers, good for the world.

A newspaper puts out not just a bunch of unrelated news articles; it organizes them into a picture of what that publisher thinks accurately portrays what’s happened (or happening, in the case of constantly updated online news). What the search engine does is picks apart the news report and displays references to the individual parts. That leaves a lot of newspaper value behind.

In the end, it’s far from clear whether the average news publisher comes out better or worse. To assert otherwise is to imply a kind of superior knowledge that simply doesn’t exist. And to end the title of this posting with “- period” seems to suggest an attitude that argues that no differing views have any validity, which strikes me as a bit arrogant.

Finally, being concerned about the effects of search engines isn’t the same as “attacking” them (as is repeatedly implied).

Mathew argues that newspapers could counter some of the deleterious effects by adding value. But what kind of value can be added that will be evident to viewers of a search engine’s article headline listing?

A case in point from the old days of print. In the UK, we had three Mac magazines. I worked on MacUser, which had the smallest circulation of the three. MacFormat had the largest – much larger, in fact, than MU’s was.

MacUser, though, was by far the most profitable. Why? Because it targetted a small, cohesive niche audience. Had we chased the larger potential audience that MacFormat addressed, we would have been less profitable – possibly even unprofitable.

That’s the point that Bailey is getting at. Sure, audience numbers are important: but they aren’t everything. What we have at the moment is thousands of news sites around the world doing commodity “me too” stories, bringing nothing original to the party.

She’s really clear about that: Big newspaper sites are devaluing news. As she puts it:

“By creating gargantuan national newspaper websites designed to harness users by the tens of millions, by performing well on search engines like Google, we have eroded the value of news.”

In other words, newspapers have been guilty of chasing traffic and traffic alone, much of it from Google. What they haven’t been doing is creating high quality or differentiated content. And, from a publishers perspective, undifferentiated content with traffic largely coming from search is actually the least-profitable thing you can have.

Journalists like you and me (and probably most people reading this) care only about the content, and naturally want to get it in front of as many people as possible. Publishers, though, don’t think like that: their job is to sell advertising. And having the biggest, widest audience doesn’t always sell the most ads.

>> If there were a finite market for news and information, then the search engine could be accused of devaluing it — but that’s not how information works. <> The reality (as I have said over and over) is that if a newspaper or media outlet finds its business model severely impacted by the fact that Google excerpts a single paragraph of a news story, then it deserves to fail. <> And if you are adding more value through context and analysis, then there are many more ways to monetize that than by slapping simple banner or text ads on it — which seems to be the only thing that Daniel and others can imagine newspapers doing. <> But if you are actually adding value, wouldn’t you like as many people to find out about it as possible? Cutting yourself off from the world’s largest search engine is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. <<

Why assume that a bigger audience is better? For example, if you have a business that has some geographic specificity, what you might have to give away to gain a much broader audience is not necessarily a profitible tradeoff.

I’ve written about this from an Australian perspective here: http://importanceofideas.com/2009/04/07/google-should-search-for-solution-too/

Once upon a time, it was simply the best way to find out what was happening in the community, nation and the world, as well as doing the crossword, checking the classifieds and more. This newspaper offered a convenient way of delivering this bundle, often to your doorstep.

But now, this has all been unbundled, creating a far more fragmented and atomised media ecosphere. Newspapers are struggling to find their place in this new media world.

Rather than attack Google, newspapers should focus on reinventing themselves as a relevant product to consumers in the 21st century. They are no longer the most convenient way to get that bundled mix of news, information and entertainment. Period.

http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/04/20/mathew-ingram-google-helps-newspapers/