Yet Another Journalism Professor Gets Nearly Every Fact Wrong In Saying Google Needs To Pay

from the facts?-who-needs-them? dept

With all the journalists declaring that Google needs to pay newspapers, it's amazing how often their arguments are based on simply incorrect statements -- the sort of thing that is the real problem newspapers face. When they make an argument based on entirely incorrect information, no one trust them. For example, reader David Muir points us to Joel Brinkley's article in the San Francisco Chronicle, where he compares the newspaper industry to the recording industry and gets nearly everything wrong. Brinkley is a former NY Times' reporter and a journalism professor at Stanford. This is the sort of person who shouldn't fall prey to getting stories backwards, but he does. First, he claims that Google is using newspapers content "without compensation."

This is wrong. Google is indexing and linking to newspaper content. They're providing a service to those newspapers, by sending them more traffic. If those newspapers don't want that service, it's quite easy to opt-out. The fact that very few do so suggests they do, in fact, value that service, and thus they feel they are getting compensated.

Then, amusingly, he compares the newspaper business to the recording industry, suggesting Google is like what Napster was a decade ago -- and questions where would the recording industry be if it hadn't shut down Napster. Rather than talk to an unbiased party, he goes straight to the RIAA, who of course talks up what a wonderful victory Napster was, and says, without having shut down Napster: "We would be in a world with thousands of pirates."

Um. I hate to break it to both Brinkley and the RIAA... but we're in a world with millions of (what they falsely define as) "pirates." In fact, I'd imagine that the recording industry would actually consider it a real victory if there were only "thousands." But does Brinkley point this out? Does he note that the legal effort to shut down Napster not only failed to stop "piracy," but actually helped advertise it, make it more prevalent, and drive it further underground to sites and communities that were much more difficult to work with?

Of course not. Because why would a super journalist like Brinkley bother with reality in making his case?

Also, it's worth pointing out that the situation with Napster was also entirely different in that it didn't involve the musicians/labels putting the content up themselves, and didn't involve Napster offering up an easy tool for them to remove that content. When it comes to newspapers and Google, both things are true.

This is the sort of stuff anyone familiar with what they were talking about would know. But Brinkley is a journalism expert, so why should he bother to understand what he's talking about before writing an entire column on it?

He then goes on to (falsely) claim that "without newspaper journalism, the nation would have little original journalism left" extrapolating out (incorrectly) the idea that because most journalism originates from newspapers today, it must continue to do so in the future. We're already seeing that's false, as new operations spring up to take over where newspapers are faltering (such as in putting forth bogus opinion pieces comparing Google to Napster).

Then (because he's not done being wrong yet), Brinkley tries (and fails) to respond to the "information wants to be free" line (which he falsely states "information should be free" -- the distinction is important, but Brinkley doesn't bother to even notice) by saying:

Wouldn't that be nice. Wouldn't it be nice if metropolitan newspapers didn't have to pay millions of dollars a year for their reporting staffs? Wouldn't it be nice if Keller's paper didn't have to pay $2 million a year to maintain its Baghdad bureau? Newspapers provide an expensive product. They deserve to be paid for it.

We've debunked this argument probably 50 times in the last year alone, but since Brinkley apparently doesn't do any research, let's debunk it one more time. No one is saying that because information is offered to consumers for free that it means that you don't make money or you don't pay your reporting staff. Brinkley is setting up a bogus strawman (the sort of thing reporters shouldn't do). What they are saying is that they need to come up with better business models (which we've pointed out do exist) that leverage (rather than deny) the basic economics of content, and do so in a way that makes a more valuable product.

Brinkley, of course, never bothers to explain how to make the product any more valuable (hint: it's not by writing columns that are entirely based on incorrect statements) or why people would want to pay for such rubbish. He just insists they "deserve to be paid for it." But if Brinkley's writing is an example of the type of quality found in papers today, is it any wonder people don't find it worth paying for?

Filed Under: copyright, joel brinkley, journalism, newspapers, recording industry
Companies: google, napster