Same story different media…. First music, then movies now newspapers. Allow me to translate the whine: “Wah. Our dated multibillion dollar business model isn’t able to survive the rapidly changing economy and we don’t see the path to new money so we will start vilifying the tech leaders as we die.”

The issue is that newspaper publishers do not want to opt out (ah the free exposure), they want a part of the cake.

The news paper seem to focus on “you are benefiting from my content”.

Nobody focuses on the fact that Google is also giving exposure to the news sources.

So a better analogy (although even this is broken because digital goods do not follow naturally the same economic rules that “realworld” stuff does) would be, what if a startup would start to copy newspapers and start to hand out a mashup of different newspapers (including the ads in that newspapers) for free.

Yes it would (and it does) limit the business plans of the news sources. Sad.

OTOH, if the current news sources do not adopt to the new rules, they will die out. Considering how the current news sources are not very journalistic, filtering and shaping the world to their tastes, I do not think that would be a bad loss.

(E.g. some local newspapers reported that the HADOPI law in France has passed. Most of these did not report that it passed by a trick, (most delegates had gone home, and the government moved up the voting to a time past midnight), nor did it report that the law has been basically struck down as unconstitutional some time later. That’s a very biased view what happens somewhere.)

With internet readership fast increasing the news papers/television channels have no choice but to have their sites indexed in Google; else they will lose out on valuable readership. There is no harm if BBC site comes up in a web search and tells the story of Michael Jackson’s demise. This is because the BBC or The NewYork Times have sent their reporter to the place and have verified the event. They have the authority to report that event. That is what news is all about! What is a problem is when other lesser known sites simply copy news from there and rewrite/rephrase it. There is no news reporting involved here; it in most cases is simply garbage. Google should put a stop to such sites immediately.

The newspaper was dead and buried long before Google came along. It was inevitable in an age of instant gratification who want to wait till tommorow to read todays news. They did not help themselves by fighting the trend and now like dinosaurs they are slowly dropping off.

Who cares if Google is “photocopying” articles from other sites. Welcome to the digital world.

If you deliver content to the internet for public consumption, then you lost your control. It then becomes my perogative as to how, when and where I consume that content. If Google can gather several public content sources into one place for me, and I find value in it, then that’s where I’ll be. If you do not want your content out there for the public, then don’t publish it.

Either way, you should face up to the fact that YOU are the vampire, as Anne Rice would have written, because you’ve lost touch with this generation.

google is just a syndication service for newspapers. i think yahoo does something similar with AP articles. there is an opt out for anyone who doesn’t want to give away their news on google.

and for all those who think that google is perfectly ok in giving away some free news think again. nothing is free in this life, somewhere out there someone must be paying for this “free” service. u just need to know whether it’s worth it.

maybe in future google will somehow force all newspapers to go bankrupt thereby create a mass scale layoffs to those loser journalists who worked for a company that didn’t want to share info for free because it had to pay its employees and stake holders. maybe that’s worth reading free news! yeah!

No actually. I regularly frequent the digital versions of the newspapers. Somtimes also I search for something and get into pages of some newspaper.

But the pages of newspapers are often so overloaded with animated adverts that my computer is nearly halting. Therefore I often go streight out of them again.

I understand that newspapers are trying to defend their dying industry but c’mon….blaming Google or anyone else on the net is like the buggy whip people trying to do away with automobiles. It’s ridiculous.

The newspaper companies who will survive in this century will morph into news-media companies, drastically reducing or even giving up print for quality online delivery. The internet is where it’s at. Either be there or fade into oblivion.

Interestingly, if these companies took the time and energy they are using to blame everyone for their woes and re-channeled it into re-defining themselves into something that fits into today’s world they’d surely come up with some proactive solutions and be a lot happier and more profitable.

I do hope newspapers don’t totally disappear though….I need something to line my birdcage, wrap my Christmas ornaments in, and use for packing in boxes

Internet searching has led me to a shorter attention span for details and for long, complex analyses of major issues. I find this unfortunate, but I believe that I have become addicted to “headline hunting”. The “Google syndrome” leads me to a good overview of what is going on, but I have less in-depth knowledge than if I were still concentrating on serious journalistic research.

Let’s face it. Newspapers are, at best, 18th Century technology. They are relics of an earlier time. Nobody drives a buggy or horse to work (except in Amish country, God love ‘em), so why should anyone read a newspaper, except online? Besides, the newspapers are heavily biased. If I want to be LIED to, I’ll read a newspaper, but the Internet allows me to search dozens, or even hundreds, of sources, so I can decide what to believe!

Ben Franklin, whom I revere, was a newspaperman, but Ben also was perhaps the greatest genius of the 18th Century. Ben would NOT be a newspaperman today—he would be an Internet Gazzillionaire! Why? Because he GOT IT!!! He also would be driving a souped up convertible instead of a carriage, and I’ll bet his place would have the best audio system in town. Get with it, people!

The main news is so tainted its close to ridiculousness to take in. I prefer to search the web and collate the presented information and work out if its true on not. As far as truth goes there is little of it that i trust, this world is built on capitalism and there is no place for truth in a profit driven world.