French and German News Publishers Want More

Sometimes it’s as if someone has only seen one side of the argument and proceeds to go half cock into resolving only what they see withoutout stepping back and taking in the wider picture and implications. How many times have we witnessed knee jerk reactions and in-trenched positions that have unravelled once people have taken a more measured viewpoint?

The French publishers originally launched their hostility at Google claiming that they and other search engines were republishing headlines and the first paragraph of articles without compensating them - the provider of the content. It is easy to see the delima as one service wants to be seen as the source and to get the hits that they can potentially monetarise, whilst the other wishes to index a broad range on content in order to provide a single portal and get the hits, that they can monotorise.  

Then in steps a government, who probably has been heavily lobbied by one side and we start to slide into a 'hotch potch' of unworkable or counter productive legislation. Last week the German cabinet gave its support to a draft law aimed to extend copyright protection to snippets of news articles republished by search engines. It would allow publishers charge search engines such as Google for the republishing of headlines and first paragraphs of articles. In essence the French and German publishers want to share in the revenue that Google earns from advertising displayed alongside their news snippets. They also believe that a headline and summary of an article that is published on Google News is often sufficient to satisfy the reader. The result they claim, is that the reader then doesn't click through to the publishers website, who then loses potential advertising revenue.

So one could first question why the publishers haven’t created their own collective news service? Is the Google service sufficient, or do people actually click through? What would be the equitable revenue share the publishers seek? Do the publishers want the share revenue or be paid per article hit? The questions go on and soon become as irrelevant as asking any TV news or radio channel for a share of news related revenues that they earn alongside the news. Google aren’t pretending the news is theirs, nor are they divulging the whole story. They are merely serving up a snippet. If that snippet didn’t exist how much traffic would even find its way to half the publishers who are demanding payment for being 'ignored' and bypassed today?

What would be the implications of extending this Franco German logic past news and magazines to other media such as books. If Amazon hadn’t pulled the industry through the metadata hedge, we still would have limited jackets on display and ‘search inside’ would be a bridge too far for many. Would book publishers now demand a fee from Amazon for creating a jacket, or search inside library that sells their content? The question of book reviews and fair use of what is basically marketing material by third parties is a very interesting point.

Sometimes we all have to recognise that the Internet is about connectivity and linking information to add value. It is about creating a ‘quid pro quo’ environment where different parties, that may have different business models and drivers, help each other for mutual benefit. Google makes money from advertising, publishers make money from publishing. Google merely uses snippets and gives full linkage and accreditation to them. They do not plagiarise the work, pass it off as theirs, or publish the full work, and they provide the publisher in effect with ' a free advert' and the more the publisher is indexed and seen, the more their brand and reputation is enhanced.

It would be perfectly responsible for publishers who don’t want to be indexed to opt out, but how many really would?  

Google Flipping or Dipping Heavy into News

The newsprint sector is changing and facing many challenges which we have previously written about. One big issue is revenue and the changing business model that is being forced on it by the internet and current economic climate. In many ways they never really thought it would change and when it did they were ill prepared. Does it mean they will all go bust – no, but what will happen is that they will have to live in a market where others may well have a greater say in the destiny and revenues and maybe their interactions with their customers.

Google is not surprisingly one of the new major influences in the sector. Marissa Mayer, Google's vice-president of Search, told BBC News, "I don't believe we are part of the problem. I believe we are part of the solution." However, earlier this year, Robert Thomson of the Wall Street Journal called the search company and other aggregators such as Yahoo "parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet" and only a few weeks ago Rupert Murdoch declared that it was time to start charging and by doing so wrestle back control.

In response, Google has launched ‘Fast Flip’ which is a news browser that allows the user to virtually "flip pages" of online content faster showing then pages of content as opposed to just titles and short snippets. The user can search on interests, have recommendations presented to them or just look at the most popular articles. Users who want to dig deeper into the story can click through to the publisher's website. Its different, but only time and usage will determine if it’s any better. It certainly is better than the current hotchpotch of news presented to us by iGoogle. Google wants to help you read news in the traditional way, just flipping the page and have the content served to you in seconds and compares Fast Flip to reading a newspaper or a magazine where the reader can turn the pages in a second.

Google has teamed up on Fast Flip with more than 30 providers such as the BBC, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Elle, Popular Mechanics, Slate, Salon, the New York Times, the Washington Post and ProPublica. Fast Flip also serves up contextual adverts around the pages and this generates revenue which is shared with the content providers, which Google says is proof that it was keen to help the industry at a time when it was clearly struggling.

So as Google Fast Flips into a new look and feel in order to help save the industry it was interesting to read about its plans to charge for news content itself through a new system of micropayments within the next year. Google announced this in a document it sent to the Newspaper Association of America in response to a request for proposals the association sent to several technology companies including IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. In its response document, Google stated that newspapers could also use Checkout to charge for subscriptions. It is now up individual newspapers to decide whether to pursue relationships with any of the companies that submitted proposals and that it would share revenue in a similar fashion to the iTunes App Store and its own Android Market, both of which take a 30% cut of revenue..

Interestingly, in a move similar to that taken in books, Google said that it believed that paid content could be a good complement to advertising. This would indicate that they recognise that advertising by itself is venerable and that potentially getting aligned to the content itself could reduce this risk.

The World According to Associated Press

The Associated Press is to create a news registry to protect their online content from copyright violations. The organization has already issued and then backed down on DMCA take down notices to bloggers who had linked to the AP, used their headlines or paraphrased AP stories.

AP’s proposed new registry, will attached AP content to a digital-permissions framework which will be actively monitored. Today each article and in the future, each picture and video, would have a digital “wrapper,” data invisible to the consumer. The software would also send signals back to AP, letting it track use of the article across the Web. Created and managed the Media Standards Trust, the new system allows the organization to gain proof of what it defines as violations in order to enforce its copyright policies.

Some see it as an attempt to lock up the news, others a rewriting of 'fair use' by the back door.

The New York Times reported Mr Curley, AP’s president and CEO, “If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that,” The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use. Search engines and news aggregators contend that their brief article citations fall under the legal principle of fair use.

News aggregators like such as Google News have licensing agreements with AP for the use of its material but not for general Internet searches that turn up news articles. Is the right to link to articles using a brief snippet of extract from that article, or the original headline on the article now fair use or subject to payment to AP?

At a time when the Newspaper industry is clearly struggling this would appear a classic ‘finger in the Dyke’ and draconian approach. Read this interest article, 'NYT Co.’s top lawyer doubts that aggregation is a copyright issue' and discover some of the potential legal issues and a transcript of an interview with NYT’s legal council.

Update Comment received from Matthew Cain, Media Standards Trust

I saw your blogpost regarding AP's recent announcement and wanted to clarify a couple of things.

The AP news registry and tracking features were not "created and managed by the Media Standards Trust". Instead, the Media Standards Trust, working with Sir Tim Berners Lee's WSRI, have created an open source draft news microformat (road signs, if you will) for readers to identify the key attributes of a news article. Far from being invisible to readers, this appears as a box at the end of an article and helps the reader distinguish news from PR and identify things such as:
* who wrote the story
* the location of the story
* any principles under which it was written

More information is available here: www.valueaddednews.org

AP have developed additional set of features which helps them monitor and track articles. The Media Standards Trust has no involvement with this.

I would be grateful if you could amend your post accordingly.

Dot2Dot

Book publishing can always learn from other media sectors. The environment may be different but the similarities are often stark and can’t be ignored. Many will try to argue that the differences are so huge that the comparison between media sectors is inappropriate, but the more we watch the media world unravel and morph from one model to another, we start to see the same or similar warning signs.

The old world created media conglomerates that controlled the channel, the creative process and focused on their market share. These grew swallowed each other up to the point where they could hardly grow any bigger. The result was that the corporate blue chip publisher ruled. This worked within the physical world where the controller of the supply chain reaped the economies of scale and the 80 / 20 economic model prevailed. However, the digital world effectively turned this upside down. As we have seen so many times, the Internet doesn’t respect corporate size and actual revenue, it respects eyeballs and potential revenue. We remember those, who ten years ago said Amazon would not survive, was over valued and the likes of Bertelsmann would crush them. The old world saw one Goose, the new world saw the Golden Egg.

Enter the omnivores who were not tied to any sector and were driven by moving technology, valued on the number of visitors and their potential pulling power, rewarded maybe by advertising. They often viewed content, on whatever format, as merely a means to an end. Also enter those from the technology sector who wanted their technology to dominate and were often focused on shifting tin or software, not content.

We now have upheaval in music, which has never recovered from Napster and continues to unravel. Newsprint and magazines could always rely on advertising. That was until the Internet stared to grab it before the newspapers could grapple with the digital shift. The film industry had a great release model that controlled what, where and when films could be seen. However, this only fuelled the pirates offer to beat both the release schedule and the price. This month gave us the ultimate piracy with the pirates even beating the release of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” , not by a day, but a whole month!

We hear one name repeatedly – Google. Their quest to make YouTube deliver stronger revenues has created new battles with the music industry bodies, such as PRS and the artists themselves. Peter Waterman’s composition ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ experienced a phenomenal 154million YouTube downloads, yet he only received £11 royalty from Google. Google now want to create Vevo.com in collaboration with Universal. But who will win from the envisaged new revenues? When Bono first suggested the marriage, he must have envisaged the artist winning, but we reserve judgement.

Google News grapples with the newspaper world on whether their use of snippets is ‘fair use’ or infringement. Some would say that they have the newspapers over a barrel, others that its time the newspapers stood up.

Google Book Search and the land-grab settlement, has had not nearly enough written about it.

When will the media sectors join up the dots?

Media Déjà Vu

Whether you believe that newsprint is solid and just going through difficult times, or it’s terminally ill, or just struggling to change its business model in a digital age, it offers a fascinating insight into a media sector from the outside. We often look at music and film as media sectors similar to books but in many ways newsprint and magazines offer as much if not more.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke at the annual meeting of the US Newspaper Association of America and although he would like to focus on technology and the mobile challenges the debate on the use of news snippets on Google News is “fair use” under copyright law or an infringement. Google has long insisted that its use of snippets and headlines in Google News is legal. It also said Google News drove a huge amount of traffic to newspaper web sites, which the publishers can then monetize through their advertising. The argument sounds fairly familiar and we couldn’t help thinking we were suffering from déjà vu.

This week, The Associated Press said that it would work to require web sites to obtain permission and share revenue with them. Newspapers are in the often usual position of questioning whether they are consenting parties or want to stand up and face the potential economic position of being outside cutting off the traffic they get from Google’s search and news services and from other search engines and potentially find themselves alone in nowhere.

William Dean Singleton, chairman of The Associated Press and chief executive of the MediaNews Group, is reported saying “We don’t plan for anyone to use our content unless they pay for it. The licenses we do in the future will limit how and where our content is used.”

If we strip away the ecomomy, business models, the plight of editors and journalists and even digital change we appear to be left with something very familiar – the question of fair usage and infringement. The other familiar story is the incentive of money over rights. Interestingly we also see a few speaking for the majority but perhaps we are overly cynical.

Are News Corp to Have Their Own Colour Reader?

Rupert Murdoch is widely reported saying that News Corp is investing in a mobile digital device for reading newspapers on a larger screen than the typical ebook reader device.

News Corp is apparently investing in a potential Kindle rival which would not only have a larger screen but importantly, four-color capable display. This means they are either pre announcing something that isn’t here today or on the horizon, a colour ink device, or they are following the lead taken by Fujitsu which however has a full colour not four colour display.

So is it investor city talk or does it have substance. If News Corp were to back a new reader could it hold its own against what is getting a crowded space. Is he looking to back colour so he can exploit all his family of assets; TV, video, news and books through one device? Time will tell but when Murdoch wants some would say Murdoch gets.

A gauntlet if ever there was one, but he didn’t stop there.

In reference to the newspaper business model problems Murdoch is reported in the Wall Street Journal saying that ‘People are used to reading everything on the net for free, and that's going to have to change." He also questioned whether the newspaper industry should continue to allow online news aggregators, such as Google Inc., to aggregate newspaper content without being compensated for it.

Google News Adds Ads

Google have started to run small text ads on the pages of its Google News service. This again raises the advertising debate between Google and the newspaper sector. Since it began, some six years ago, Google has not placed ads on Google News. This has helped calm newspapers who believed that Google would build a competing news site based on their own material.

Google News automatically collects headlines and news from over 4,500 news sites and links users to the original articles on those sites. This drives significant traffic to many news sites. Google has maintained that its use of headlines and snippets was permissible under “fair use” provisions of copyright law.

In 2006, the World Association of Newspapers demanded that Google News stop indexing its member sites on the grounds that Google was profiting from the use of their copyright material. Agence France-Presse sued Google for the same thing in 2005. At the time, Google News carried no advertisements and hence, no obvious revenue stream.

The addition of AdWords to Google News was inevitable as the economy continues to weaken and Google looks to expand its revenue streams. But what will be the reaction from the newspaper sector now that they also feel the advertising downturn?

I Want 'My News', Now and for Free!

Much has been written of late about the state of the newsprint industry. The US market appears to be in free fall, with the operative word on many tongues being ‘free’. Journalists are losing their jobs, papers are up for sale, or sailing closer to the wind and the advertising revenue, which once made this sector so lucrative is either drying up or electing to go elsewhere. Newsprint publishers are ceasing to print on paper and going free online.

Does this mean that newspapers will disappear tomorrow – No? Does it mean that some will fall – almost certain?

Newsprint has a long history which has local, regional and global pressures. What once was local copy in Malaysia, a city in Scotland, national press in Australia is now available instantly to us all globally, 24 x 7. Services such as Google aggregate the news and segment it to fit our tastes, alerts constantly feed our favourite key words. Journalism is fast becoming democratised, where every blog, web article is becoming a potential news feed and the letter to the editor is often no longer mediated, but instantly posted and encouraged.

It seems a long time from the birth of the tabloid at the beginning of the 20th century. This explosion was fuelled by mass literacy, world events and the public’s insatiable appetite to read ‘spicy news’. In the late 20th century restrictive practices were broken in the UK and everywhere we saw the rise of the free local paper. Established local papers were driven to change or die. The the whole advertising model came under threat from the free classifieds such as Craiglists and the Google online ad machine. In the UK market, the downturn in the economy has hit the spending of big newsprint advertisers such as estate agents and the motor trade.

The increased demand in recent years by advertisers for 100% colour resulted in UK publishers investing in newspaper presses, but now publisher/printers are looking to close shifts or working with other newspaper Groups to close presses altogether. Many UK publishers are now looking to reduce costs by outsourcing their production facilities overseas. To compound this further, UK newsprint has just seen one of its largest cost increases in recent years.

Mass connectivity and technology literacy is now fuelling change. Increasingly everyone is connected and online. The person on the street with a mobile, has often became the photographer and sometimes even the journalist.

In an attempt to create loyalty and broaden their appeal UK papers in recent years have started to trade on their brand. Bookclubs acting as white label stores, glossy inserts full of gadgets and special offers, clubs from wine to dating were all born, CDs and DVDs were enclosed as special ‘extras’. Is this the future of newsprint or merely an attempt to raise revenues and cross subsidy?

Hard economics have started to bite and along with technology are opening up both new opportunities and new threats. Newspapers, so long a safe and predicable media has failed to respond. Readers have become more discerning and eclectic, wanting not general, but ‘My News’. Today the industry appears like rabbits frozen and caught in the glare of the digital headlights. Layoffs, closures, debt are all hovering like vultures around many well known names. Journalism is torn between authoritative column inches and democratised blogs. We have previously written about the cartoonist, who are now changing their own model in response to the pressure on their strips.

Papers such as the Kansan in Kansas City may point the way forward for a community press , The New York Times and others have to grapple with the challenges of general or what is now ‘commoditised news’ and although it seems that the ‘specialist’ papers such as the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal have a captive model based on their insights and commentary, we note that 80 jobs went yesterday at the FT.

The one thing we can be sure of is that the landscape and business model is changing. ‘My News’ is real, ‘Free’ is real, many want their news ‘now’ and fed to them 24 x 7.

Google Hoovers up More News

Libraries, books and newsprint are all targets for Googles endless search to hover up the world’s information.

Google is to digitize dozens of historical newspapers making scanned images of the original papers available online. Google has said in it’s website that it is looking to make old newspapers searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives. They have been working two major U.S. newspapers; The New York Times and Washington Post, to index old papers in Google News Archive. These have been joined by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "the first newspaper West of the Alleghenies" (the Allegheny Mountains), to the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, which has continuously published for 244 years, making it North America's oldest lasting paper.