Brazilian Newspapers Leave Google News En Masse

Dupple writes "In light of the recent story regarding Google threatening a French media ban after France proposed that search engines should pay for content, it seems a similar thing is happening in Brazil, with numerous papers leaving Google News. The controversy fueled one of the most intense debates during the Inter American Press Association's 68th General Assembly, which took place from Oct. 12 to 16 in São Paulo. On one side of the debate were defenders of news companies' authoring rights, like German attorney Felix Stang, who said, 'platforms like Google's compete directly with newspapers and magazines because they work like home pages and use content from them.' On the other, Google representatives said their platform provides a way to make journalistic content available to more people. According to Marcel Leonardi, the company's public policies director, Google News channels a billion clicks to news sites around the world."

Re:Let them

[luncheon]

This. The IAPA is just a CIA-funded lobby organization formed by all the Latin American right wing print media owners (that 1300 newspaper thing on the Wikipedia article is misleading, since it represents just a couple of monopolic media groups per country). They are the Fox News of Latin America, operating from the US. I think that their biggest fear apart from the supposed traffic (and revenue) loss is the archival capacity of Google, since with an external site linking to their news content it's harder for them to control the way they show the news (and the possibility of modifying archive media).

Re:Let them

[hypergreatthing]

Google should pay the newspapers for the content, and the newspapers should pay Google for indexing and pointing people to the content. And the cost for both should be equal.
Ohh, that's how it is right now? ok
If they want to shoot themselves in the foot let them. They'll come crawling back.

Re:Let them

[dsvick]

Aggregate sites do drive viewers to articles, but it may be that they are driving them in a way that is not profitable for the news sites themselves.

That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, there is no difference between one person staying on the site and viewing 10 pages vs 10 separate people viewing a single page each. I'd even be willing to bet that the news sites get more out of it than google does. When I go to google news I usually hit the page one time, scroll through it and click on whatever articles interest me. Those sites all open in another tab/window, the google news page doesn't change or refresh so I'm only giving them a single hit, while the news sites are all getting one. I don't see the inequity.

I'm of the opinion that the vast majority of news articles are pretty much the same across news sites anyway and I really don't care (too much) where I'm reading it from, so I don't go out of my way to remember any specific ones. If they are at the top of the pile on google, well then, they're the one that gets clicked. and if they aren't listed, they'll never get my click. If it weren't for google I wouldn't even know they existed, I'd end up at some small number news sites that I could remember and found reasonably unbiased, odds are it would be one of the big name sites, or more than one just to add a little balance. While that is great for the foxnews and cnns of the world, it is not so good for eastNowhereActionnews. But, hey, if they want to go it without google, more power to them, there are probably a couple of dozen people there that know their url and will visit it.