Newspaper Publisher: Search Engines Break Into Our Homes

from the excuse-me? dept

Reader Mark points us to the latest ridiculous claims from a newspaper publisher against search engines like Google. This time, it's Brendan Hopkins, the CEO of APN, Australia's largest regional newspaper, who seems to be blaming everyone else for his own inability to come up with a good business model. The real kicker is his attack on search engines:

"To use an analogy, I see search engines as breaking into our homes, itemising the contents, walking out and listing everything for everyone to see. And they get money out of that process.... The only problem is, I don't see any revenue being paid directly from Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft in our company profit and loss accounts."

Yes, how dare they point more people to your site. And this isn't private info in your house that Google is suddenly maliciously displaying. This is content that you put up on your site on purpose with the goal of getting more people to see it. The analogy would only make sense if you didn't offer up that content for public consumption.

But, of course, the blame also gets spread around to anyone else who reports on the news in one of APN's papers:

"Our value is diminished by other media companies, both online and in print, with limited resources, who feed off our newspapers, by those who take the ideas of the newspapers, rewrite our journalists' words to be miraculously their own words, and then put it on a blog or a broadcast piece and call that journalism."

No, your value isn't diminished in such scenarios -- it's increased. Otherwise, why would anyone want to use your work as a basis of their own. If you can't monetize being first and having all the contacts and the details, doesn't that suggest a problem with your own ways of trying to monetize, rather than with what your competitors are doing?

Even worse, Hopkins claims that YouTube's recent agreement with PRS over music hosted on YouTube should serve as a model for newspapers to get paid. I had suggested earlier, that Google's willingness to "cave" on some of these sorts of deals was only going to cause more problems, as more companies and industries would all start assuming that Google owed them money too -- using the examples of where Google paid others as evidence. Unfortunately, it looks like that was correct.

Filed Under: brendan hopkins, journalism, newspapers, search engines
Companies: apn