Newspapers

Wall Street Journal publisher Les Hinton has called Google a “vampire” that has a taste for sucking the blood out of newspapers. I’d do a long dissection of his mistaken analogy, but I’ve already done that before: Google’s Love For Newspapers & How Little They Appreciate It. Why do we continue to hear such tiresome [...]

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At the end of May, I was enjoying a nice Sunday afternoon reading my paper, trying not to think about work, when I came across Tim Rutten’s column, “How the Obama administration can save newspapers.” And I sighed, because apparently newspapers need a license to collude to solve their “search engine” problem. If they can’t [...]

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The newspaper bailout has arrived, or so the headlines are going in the wake of Washington State granting a 40% tax break to newspapers. That got me thinking — why just newspapers? If the intent was to promote journalism, shouldn’t any outlet that publishes journalism have gotten the break? In particular, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer stopped [...]

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As the rhetoric over how Google “rips-off” newspapers, magazines and other print publishers continues, a thought occurred to me this weekend. Perhaps Google should charge publications whose reporters tap into the service to research their stories? Perhaps that might underscore, especially for the Associated Press, the absurdity of trying to charge for the mere right [...]

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The Pulitzer Prizes were announced today — and sincere congrats to the hard-working journalists who’ve won those highest of prizes. But with no online-only publications winning — in the first year they were eligible to enter — I wonder if it’s time for an online-only version of the Pulitzers to be offered. I was struck [...]

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It was a hostile audience. It was June 2007, at a conference center in London, where newspaper and magazine publishers were hearing how a new industry-backed search engine rights standard called ACAP was coming along. The day ended with an “issues” oriented panel. The audience didn’t seem that pleased with me telling them they were [...]

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I’m doing a “brown bag” lunch talk at the Los Angeles Times today which means an informal talk on newspapers and how they can use SEO to improve their traffic. Since it’s informal, I didn’t make a formal presentation. But I did want to jot down a few tips to highlight, and I figured I’d [...]

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