Wordblog

Mary C Rush is upset by the slimming-down of her local newspaper, the Mansfield News-Journal in Ohio and has written to the editor with a question:

Just who is it that is responsible for placing the contents of newspapers on the Internet every day? It’s enough to boggle one’s mind how this occurs.

Why can’t newspapers have this practice discontinued, and then they can go back to the old-fashioned way of publishing their paper and regain their subscribers and advertisers?

Naive or tongue-in-cheek, I don’t know which. But she is really not that far from some of the big names in the industry.

Robert Thomson, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, told The Australian that companies such as Google were “parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet”. He said:

…consumers must understand why they were paying a premium for content.

It’s certainly true that readers have been socialised — wrongly I believe — that much content should be free.

And there is no doubt that’s in the interest of aggregators like Google who have profited from that mistaken perception. And they have little incentive to recognise the value they are trading on that’s created by others.

Google argues they drive traffic to sites, but the whole Google sensibility is inimical to traditional brand loyalty.

Google encourages promiscuity — and shamelessly so — and therefore a significant proportion of their users don’t necessarily associate that content with the creator.
Therefore revenue that should be associated with the creator is not garnered.

Last week Thomson’s boss, News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch, said: “People reading news for free on the web, that’s got to change.” As Roy Greenslade says: “Clearly, News Corp is launching a propaganda offensive against Google. Not that it is the first mainstream media organisation to do that.”

Mary C Rush is right in saying, in effect, that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The Mansfield News-Journal is not going to close down its web  operation but if it brought in more money her beloved paper would be healthier.

As she says: “If newspapers are forced to stop publishing, there won’t be any information to be placed on the Internet.”