1. There was a SF Chronicle columnist who made a similar complaint about search engines.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/03/14/BUG4COKGDU1.DTL

Among the suggestions is the creation of a consortium to withhold content:

--

"The answer, I think, is that newspapers have to go further. They have to be prepared to charge for online access to their products just as they charge for print access.

But that won't be easy.

"I would not want to be the first newspaper to decide to charge," said Joel Brinkley, a journalism professor at Stanford University and former New York Times reporter. "Readers would run away. Advertisers would run away."

I agree. For this to work, the entire industry would have to come together and unite in saying that the era of the free online lunch is over.

--

He also suggests that the newspaper industry lobby Congress for exemptions to antitrust law to allow this to happen. He wants the Drudge Report and Huffington Post to pay licensing fees.

One of the big fallacies of his argument is that he presumes that newspaper content is original. In reality, most papers (especially ones the size of the SF Chronicle) are re-packagers of information.

Think of all of the content in a newspaper that comes from third parties: most national and international news stories, many columnists, many travel/auto/feature stories, stock quotes, weather forecasts, TV listings, comics, crossword puzzles. It used to be that the newspaper was the best, cheapest way to get that aggregation of data.

Not anymore.

The creators of a lot of that content have found that they can use the Internet to cut out the middleman.

I spent 5+ years in the online newspaper business. In the early days, we were innovative. I built one of the first database publishing systems, online MLS listings and entertainment guides. Now, with a few exceptions, most newspaper sites have given up on innovation.

Some of my thoughts on how newspapers can adapt to a search centric world:
http://blog.agrawals.org/2007/03/04/taking-newspapers-beyond-tonights-fishwrap/
http://blog.agrawals.org/2007/01/03/adapting-online-newspapers-to-a-searchweb-20-world/

Posted at 7:56PM on Apr 7th 2007 by Rocky Agrawal

2. I completely agree with your thoughts on the newspaper industry and how the papers are consistently digging their own graves, so to speak. About how long to you think it will be until the last paper boy throws the last 'print' newspaper?

15 years? 25 years? I work at a small town newspaper right now, and I'm looking for the best possible time to get out. :)

Posted at 8:11PM on Apr 7th 2007 by Bryan Pearson

3. This article from Knowledge@Wharton is worth a read for anyone interested in the online news business:
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1699

The focus is on washingtonpost.com, but it also speaks to the industry as a whole.

Posted at 8:33PM on Apr 7th 2007 by Rocky Agrawal

4. Great rant, and ditto to the first post. I'm not sure though that I agree with the notion that newspapers need to charge for their online content. They CAN of course, as a few already do, if and only if they are confident they will have a readership that is willing to pay the premium, generally this involves some sort of specialty content (eg: Wall Street Journal). But I don't think charging for content saves the day for them. What saves the day is having up to the minute, interactive, online content, and having *original* content rather than just AP and Reuters stuff.

It's been said before that the main reason many people still subscribe to any local paper at all is to keep up with High School sports, and other strictly local activities. Some community based web site could (or maybe already is) supplant print media in this area too.

One way or another I think the primary content is going to be online for everything. What needs to happen is to have this content easily available in printed form "on demand" for subway riders and other such situations where a hard copy version is desirable. The nice thing about this though is no two people's "on demand" version need look alike. Take the logic Google uses to construct my IG page, allow me to identify myself to a public printer, and out come all the stories, complete with related advertising, free or at minimal cost. No new technology needed to do this, other than maybe an abuse hardened printer with a really big toner cartridge.

I did a somewhat related post on this just yesterday. What ticked me off was yet another bait and switch effort to get me to subscribe to a paper magazine. What is bothersome is that I really like the magazine, but their efforts to do online-only content (two so far) have both failed. In one case they took an existing online publication and reformatted it into a glorified forum, in the other case they went all-PDF. Clearly, some of these people have a paper fetish. Anyway, my rant:

http://macbeach.blogspot.com/2007/04/linux-gazette-wikipedia.html

Posted at 8:42PM on Apr 7th 2007 by macbeach

5. Zell has proven himself an extremely smart guy and great business man in the past as a successful real estate entrepreneur. Unfortunately, the newspaper/content business in 2007 is not the commercial real estate business!! It is absolutely astonishing to me that by the Tribune's own admission, their online efforts are "feeble," and essentially sub par, yet the sheriff feels they need to start charging them? Somebody send Sam a copy of Cluetrain, please - He clearly doesn't "get it" Even though now he's got it.

Posted at 9:03PM on Apr 7th 2007 by Chris

6. Ashkan: Sequoia backed Google, Yahoo, Apple, PayPal, and hundreds of other companies. I have no financial interest in any of those companies or Sequoia's investment in them--I'm an EIR at Sequoia not a partner. That means I get nothing from Sequoia's investments. If you were confused by this perhaps I need to explain what an EIR is...

Posted at 9:09PM on Apr 7th 2007 by Jason

7. Zell has proven himself an extremely smart guy & great business man in the past as a successful real estate entrepreneur.

Unfortunately, the newspaper/content business in 2007 is not the commercial real estate business of the past!! It is absolutely astonishing to me that by the Tribune's own admission, their online efforts are "feeble," and essentially sub par, yet he thinks they're going to become successful by starting to charge for them?

If no one is reading you when you're FREE, even less will read you when you're NOT free!

Somebody send Sam a copy of Cluetrain, please - He
clearly doesn't "get it" Even though now he's got it.

Posted at 9:10PM on Apr 7th 2007 by Chris

8. In terms of disclosure, ashkan karbasfrooshan apparently missed the right hand corner of your site, "Hello. My name is Jason. I'm an "Entrepreneur in Action" at Sequoia Capital. I was previously the co-founder of Weblogs, Inc. with Brian Alvey, and the GM of Netscape."

However, you may want to fix the error pointed out regarding 'their' and 'they're' in your headline ...

In terms of content not being stolen, the real point is that Google may allow sites to opt out but no where does Google News provide an opt in .. in which ALL sites are linked - especially when some of the sites linked in Google News are just scrapping someone else's content. Why can't the original source be shown rather than all of the scrappers? Can't Google figure out how to follow the links? Check out Engadget, Digg, or Slashdot - all are scrappers with only comments being "original." Google points to these sites constantly.

In fact, Google chooses which sites to display and not always is the choice the right one - thus creating and recreating 'feelings' of certain websites being larger and more important than others.

Posted at 9:20PM on Apr 7th 2007 by LPH

9. Before dismissing him, consider for a moment that the billionaire has some experience and insight of value. I actually think Sam Zell has a point, and I've explained why on my blog.

One clarification of your post:

Google News does make money from posting the news.

By driving up links to newspaper Web sites, loads of remnant inventory is created on those sites. Since local advertisers have no interest in these one-off page views, then Google convinces these sites to use Google AdSense for filling the remnant space. This isn't coincidence. Google understands the effect of driving up remnant inventory via Google News.

All multi-billion dollar companies are in it for the money, Google included. They're not featuring Google News prominently on their ever-so-sparse home page just to be nice. Or is that really what you thought they were doing?

Posted at 9:36PM on Apr 7th 2007 by Lucas

10. I have taken classes about, led debates about and searched all over the internet for the subject of "the Future of Print Journalism/Newspapers". Apparently newspapers have been dying for years so I am not surprised by this public display of ignorance on the part of those in charge.

Robert Scoble agrees that newspapers are dead: http://scobleizer.com/2007/03/24/newspapers-are-dead/

Whether you believe that or not is up to you, however; the internet, powered by search engines like Google, has leveled the playing field and is helping no-name bloggers become well-known news sources. If the newspaper industry can't see that, then they are definitely too far lost.

Posted at 9:57PM on Apr 7th 2007 by David

11. Google does steal content.

Consider their image search. Imagine if just 49 other sites scraped images in the same way? Now I have to go and add 49 'opt out' entries to my robots.txt file? That doesn't seem fair.

Why must we always opt out of these things instead of opting in? Why is it assumed that if something's on the web it's fair game for everyone to use in whatever creative manner they want?

Moreover, "fair use" is NOT 200 characters. Sometimes and entire blog post is 200 characters. A haiku is less than 200 characters. Plain and simple automated scraping is NOT fair use. Fair use is when someone uses a PORTION of a piece of work AND they attribute proper credit to the ORIGINAL source.

LPH makes an excellent point:
"Why can't the original source be shown rather than all of the scrappers? Can't Google figure out how to follow the links? Check out Engadget, Digg, or Slashdot - all are scrappers with only comments being "original." Google points to these sites constantly."

Now, maybe I'd buy your argument if we WEREN'T talking about US copyright violations.

Until the major leaders of the web stop violating copyright or until popular opinion in the US regarding copyright and ownership of intellectual property, newspapers will live on. They're not gonna die anytime soon so long as writers and publishers feel they can't trust the web to value their work.

Posted at 11:25PM on Apr 7th 2007 by Elaine Vigneault

12. I cannot remember where I heard this but if I can recall correctly Donald Trump was going to purchase large newspaper (can't remember which one) the deal was set and the closing was scheduled, but The Donald couldn't get out of bed on the day of the closing because he had the flu. The paper said if he didn't show up for the paper closing then the paper was going to sell it to someone else. Looking back Trump says he was very lucky to have been sick because he would have lost billions. Zell, better hope he has the flu on the day of closing or he will loose billions.

Posted at 12:24AM on Apr 8th 2007 by Andrew

13. This is an obvious beginning of the end. People are always stubborn when technology takes over. Newspapers and radio are all hurting as a result of the web. It's only a matter of time.

Posted at 4:18AM on Apr 8th 2007 by Tom

14. Hear hear ... what a fool ...

Posted at 8:47AM on Apr 8th 2007 by Jeremy Crane

15. Spiders shouldn't be allowed to take content from any site without permission.

The entire way the robots.txt file works is backward. The file should award permission instead of opting out. Google and others have no legal right to copy your content without asking. And you, as the content owner, have no requirement to tell anyone they're not allowed to just take content. You've already told them they can't take it simply by holding the copyright.

Google ignores copyright. But it's not just Google. The entire Web is still set up this way because Congress hasn't understood the implications yet. Eventually, they will. And this will change with the laws.

The other option is the Congress never wakes up to the issues of copyright infringement online, and instead Google and others get sued and lose millions. The courts will not side with them.

Posted at 9:00AM on Apr 8th 2007 by Lucas

16. Zell gave a lively, funny speech at the Stanford Law School about SOX. The quote that Jason seizes upon is from a Q&A session at the end. I'm not sure it is a completely accurate quote, but in any event it was followed by a bit more discussion. I think the point may have been that, given that Google has settled with AP and Agence-France Presse, if enough newspapers refuse to allow their sites to be indexed, their relationships with Google could be changed to their benefit. But who knows? Certainly not Jason.

Zell is a very smart guy and would expect his investment to be a success. The hyperventilating by the tech blogging set because of an off-the-cuff answer to a question wholly unrelated to the topic at hand is unwarranted.

Posted at 10:51AM on Apr 8th 2007 by Percy Walker

17. >>"newspapers... have to be prepared to charge for online access to their products just as they charge for print access."

It's my understanding that the sales price of a newspaper adds only marginally to its revenue, the vast majority of which comes from ads. So, how could charging for online access make that much difference? Besides, people will not pay for online access to news content, or anything else online, for that matter.


>>"...no-name bloggers become well-known news sources."

What counts is the creation of news, i.e., original reporting. Most bloggers don't do that. We might read bloggers who point to news created by other people, but that's all they're doing.

>>"...fair use" is NOT 200 characters."

Copyright law does not provide a yardstick to determine fair use. If it did, fair use arguments would not be resolved via litigation.

>>"Check out Engadget, Digg, or Slashdot - all are scrappers with only comments being "original." Google points to these sites constantly."

Whatever Slashdot is, it isn't a "scrapper". The links to news sources are created by live people, often two-three days after that particular news cycle has concluded. The links are intended to attract comments. You can argue, as I would, that Google ought not to include Slashdot and similar sites as sources of news because they do no original news creation, but to argue that Google should not link to sites that also publish links to other sources is to argue that no one can link to sites that also publish stories with links.

More to the point, if Google's snippet-and-a-link isn't fair use, how can it be fair use when I do the same thing in my blog?

Besides, in many instances, people who come to Slashdot (or any other site) via Google do click through to the original source. The net result: More people read the original content than would without the links.

>>"Google and others have no legal right to copy your content without asking."

Google isn't copying content, except when they grab a snippet to use in their search results. Google believes that constitutes fair use. If you disagree, sue them.

Google indexes content that others have made available on the web, which is a public place. If Google was really copying content, then none of the links in a search results listing would point back to the original source. They would all point back to a Google server.

I am a staunch defender of copyright, but securing the financial success of the newspaper industry via a zealous defense of its copyrights is as likely to be no more successful a strategy than it is in the music industry.

Posted at 11:20AM on Apr 8th 2007 by billg

18. Excellent observations. Run with it!

Posted at 3:22PM on Apr 8th 2007 by Anne

19. WRT disclosure: An about box in the upper right corner of your blog may not cut it anymore. Isn't the new standard for disclosure a marker pen across the forehead?

Posted at 3:32PM on Apr 8th 2007 by Michael Markman

20. i think one point perhaps is that articles found in websites run by newspapers, small and large, offer an added level of richness to google's base business model: searching for information (information often found in these articles, cached or otherwise).

reporters, editors, writers, etc. should be rewarded, via their newspapers, for the time and energy spent in putting together their articles. perhaps zell is just trying to explore what that fair ground should be. if the newspaper industry were together, i'd think they'd put together their own syndicated version of adsense and explore other business models...

Posted at 4:37PM on Apr 8th 2007 by th