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| Sunday, April 8, 2007 |
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Context is king 
| | Earlier this last week I heard a biopic NPR report on Sam Zell, the new owner of the Tribune papers. It was a positive piece that gave me some hope that the papers might live. |
| | The headline suggested a story much darker than what it reported about Zell: that reporters for the Washington Post — one of most Web-savvy of big papers — are as clueless as Sam Zell about about what the Web is and how it works. |
| | But reporters usually don't write headlines at big papers, so I didn't want to blame Ahrens and Vick (or the WaPo) until I began to read the story, about a speech Zell gave at Stanford Law School on Thursday night. The revealing paragraphs: |
| | "If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?" Zell said during the question period after his speech. "Not very." |
| | Newspapers have allowed Google to use their articles in exchange for a small cut of advertising revenue, but search engines also help to distribute their content to wider online audiences. Google and Yahoo have financial arrangements with wire services, such as the Associated Press, to provide news stories and photos. Yesterday, Google settled a copyright-infringement lawsuit with Agence France-Presse, which had alleged that Google posted news summaries, headlines and photos without permission. |
| | Earth to Post: Google is not the Web. It's a search engine. Big difference. Putting editorial on the Web is itself permission for anybody to read it, search it, index it, and link to it. Not just to "exchange" that for anything. If there is an advertising deal between some papers and Google, that is hardly the only reason those papers put editorial on the Web. (Curious... is the "exchange" Ahrens and Vick write about nothing more than Adsense at work? It would be good to know.) The fact that Agence France-Press sued Google over alleged copyright-infringement shows that AFP is clueless as hell about the Web. And the fact that Google settled the suit with AFP says nothing about what the Web is or why news organizations would put their goods there. |
| | Earth to Zell: If you don't want people to read editorial anywhere but on paper, don't put it on the Web, or embed code that tells search engines not to index it. (Trust me, Google obeys it.) But don't expect whatever you gain in paid-archive sales to exceed what you sacrifice in lost authority and advertising sales on exposed content. With locked-up archives, searches for subjects your papers have covered well will exclude results that will exclude that coverage. Your papers need to adapt to a world where readers look increasingly to the Web as the place to find useful editorial. If you must monetize your editorial online, make your Web practices reflect your paper ones: charge for the news and give away the olds. That and other advice can be found here. |
| | The big irony here is that the Washington Post — one of the few papers that commendably doesn't lock up its editorial archives (do Ahrens and Vick even know that?) — may be vulnerable to becoming as dumb about the Web as the majority of other papers, which seem to share Zell's Web-blind prejudices. With reporters, of all people, leading the way. (Though Ahrens and Vick aren't alone. David Lazarus of the San Francisco Chronicle — ironically one of the very few other papers that exposes its archives — has similar ideas.) |
| | By the way, when Linux Journal experimented briefly with locking up archives a while back, the decision to open them again was based on one important fact (among many others): it gets harder and harder to find good writers who put up with having their work locked behind paywalls. |
| | More from Jason Calacanis, who says Sam Zell is going to lose billions on newspapers and the Washington Post has no idea what they're talking about. No shirt. |
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