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Re: Friday, May 16, 2003
The real issue is about what the Web can do for publishers and vice versa. That's it. Everything else, blogging included, is a red herring. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and any other publication, "serious": or otherwise, is free to wall off and charge for all the information they want. They just shouldn't complain when their stories don't show up in searches, by Google or any other engine (all of which now emulate, one way or another, Google's PageRank algorithms). And they should think twice before pubishing pieces that blame those forms of journalism that allow themselves to be found by search engines for the absence of those that don't. Papers like the Journal and the Times have tough choice to make, between the easily-established and maintained authority that comes with exposure on the Web, and the money to be made by selling archives. Many periodicals, such as the news and business magazines (other than Business Week, I believe), have chosen to expose their archives. Most big newspapers still charge for their archives. Each to their own. Let's just be fair and informative about the trade-offs involved. Paid archives are Lexis-Nexis' whole business. Selling advertising and subscriptions are nearly the New York Times' whole business. Selling archives is a relatively small part of the Times' business — small enough that the Times should carefully consider the costs of not exposing those archives on the Web. Those costs are real. So are the opportunities. It is entirely possible that the Times would make more money selling subscriptions and ads if its archives were exposed, crawled by the likes of Google, and present at the tops of search results where the paper's good work remains ever-more-obviously absent. This isn't about good vs. evil, who has a life and who doesn't, who's trying to "wash" search results, or any of the sarcastic bile in your penultimate paragraph (and also, to different degrees, in Orlowski's and Nunberg's pieces). Sure, "noise" is an issue. Google and its competitors are all over it, with limited success.. It's not easy to solve, and it has many causes, blogging among them. It's also not the publilshers' problem. Their problem is a Web that's growing larger and more important — to nearly everybody — in their partial absence. There are responses to this message:
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