Newspapers

Connect the dots, see if you can spot the picture. Some news publishers call visitors they get via search from Google worthless. Meanwhile, you’ve got online media companies directly looking at search activity as a way to make money. Who’s not getting it? My If Newspapers Were Stores, Would Visitors Be “Worthless” Then? post last week covers [...]

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Like many, I got a laugh out of the Daily Show piece earlier this year poking fun at the New York Times for selling “aged news.” But a talk I heard by Kevin Marks this summer made me realize that newspapers don’t push aged news. They push TiVoed news, or recorded news or stored news. [...]

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As the war of words ramps up between Google and some news publishers, the latest spin seems to be how “worthless” the traffic is that Google sends. In reality, the traffic probably does have value, but the newspapers are likely doing a terrible job of monetizing it. I’ll give some examples in a minute, but how [...]

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Google, accused by some as being a book thief, now has company — the Associated Press. The AP patted itself on the back in an internal memo that detailed how it scanned a copy of Sarah Palin’s book without permission, to make it searchable. The irony is rich. The AP hasn’t taken a stance against Google [...]

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Earlier the year, the FTC announced it would be holding a two day workshop in Washington DC on Dec. 1 & 2 called “How Will Journalism Survive The Internet Age” to explore issues such as fair use, aggregator impact on journalism and related issues. The agenda has now been posted, with remarks from heavy-hitter speakers such [...]

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I’d thought I’d heard it all in the debate over Google and newspapers, but yesterday Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson took it up a notch. He accused Google of making people slutty. If we’re using sexual metaphors now, here’s another one. Why doesn’t the Wall Street Journal and News Corporation [...]

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The Microsoft-Yahoo search deal was big news this past week, and I took plenty of press calls about it, including from the AP. But to quote what I told the AP, I have to pay them $17.50. Here’s the article, where I’m quoted as saying:

It really hard to tell whether (Bartz) just thinks Yahoo isn’t that [...]

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Free! Why is it when it comes to the internet and media, free is becoming a four-letter word online while offline, free’s simply the way business has been done? Below, some thoughts on free online versus offline plus the difficulty of “licensing” newspaper content. Radio stations play music all day long, for free. Just giving away [...]

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