Brazilian Newspapers Leave Google News En Masse 223
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."
Let them (Score:5, Insightful)
They'll see what happens when their visits drop. People can't be expected to remember every paper that there is and go to each individual site when attempting to find a specific story. This will only be to the papers' detriment.
Re:Let them (Score:4, Insightful)
Why don't they just put headlines and first paragraphs on one page and set robots.txt to allow search engines to index it, then put the full articles on a different page with indexing not allowed. Google's crawler would get the headline and synopsis and the papers would get advertising from everyone who was interested enough to read more than a few sentences.
Re:Let them (Score:5, Informative)
Why don't they just put headlines and first paragraphs on one page and set robots.txt to allow search engines to index it, then put the full articles on a different page with indexing not allowed. Google's crawler would get the headline and synopsis and the papers would get advertising from everyone who was interested enough to read more than a few sentences.
That's basically what Google does already: just puts headlines and 1-2 sentences from the start, with a link to TFA. The newspapers don't even want that much.
Re:Let them (Score:4, Funny)
With the robots.txt solution, the way I understand it Google wouldn't even index the full article, and thus text that only appears in the article (not the summary) would not be factored into search results.
This is basically SEO suicide, but whatever... it's their server, they can cry if they want to.
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The newspaper don't even want that much without being paid for it ... not being indexed at all isn't really something they want either.
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Because putting in the effort to find a technical solution is a lot harder than complaining to your politicians.
Re:Let them (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't they just put headlines and first paragraphs on one page....
Have you actually *been* to news.google.com ??? Didn't think so.
Google News is nothing more than an aggregator for news sites. They provide headline and first sentence and a link to the actual news site.
What the news sites are bitching about is people go to google to look at what is happening instead of their main pages. News sites provide the food but they don't make the menu anymore and that is the problem.
Re:Let them (Score:5, Insightful)
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This could be a problem for us, the consumers, if the content creators have to ... do less research, and/or provide less depth
If we are talking about mainstream media, I doubt that is possible. So we are safe.
Re:Let them (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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compulsory payments
the problem (for news organizations) with this is that news is a commodity now. i can get my news from an indie source that offers it for free or i can get it from the an established organization ... i'm going to pick the free one.
Re:Let them (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. Google doesn't show the entire article, they show enough content to drive viewers to the article. It's up to the individual sites to retain those visitors, not Google.
Newspapers should be paying Google for the service of indexing and driving customers to them.
Re:Let them (Score:4)
The Brazilian papers are doing the right thing if they feel that Google news (and similar indexers/aggregators) are costing more clicks/view/revenue than they are bringing in. Opt out. I suspect they are wrong, but they are welcome to try it for awhile. If it doesn't work, they can always change their minds and opt back in.
Unlike the French media, which expects Google to channel views to them for nothing and pay them for the privilege.
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Well, we certainly don't want fewer sources of opinion, so having them disappear entirely would not necessarily better for everyone... I think their effort is a good way to kick Google in the balls and encourage them to start paying the folks who make them legitimate in the first place.
After all, if it weren't for the news outlets, Google would have nothing to link to (as far as news, anyway)
Re:Let them (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let them (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
There are basically two types of websites: Free and paywalled.
If your website is free, you're publishing it for people to read without any expectation of payment (except perhaps from ads run on your site). Why should Google have to pay you for viewing your site when nobody else does?
If you website is paywalled, then Google can't index it, so it's not going to show up in their search results and you have nothing to complain about.
And if you're one of those people with a free website but still don't want Google to index it, then just drop a robots.txt file in it.
There is a mutual relationship that benefits both. It's just that the "both" aren't the people you think it is. Google's relationship is with the person searching the web. The person gets the benefit of finding stuff on the web more easily, and Google gets the benefit of advertising dollars. Once Google delivers the viewer to your site, what you do with him and how you monetize it is entire up to you. Google has no relationship with the content provider beyond what a regular viewer has (they read the content).
Re:Let them (Score:4, Insightful)
no Google should not pay. Google just show a headline and the first bit. The reader then clicks and goes to the website.
Google is driving people to the site. If I had a business that could double your reader, you would gladly pay me.
Google does it for free.
Re:Let them (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a blatant misrepresentation of the situation through omission of key facts, aka lie of omission. Google's core operating principle is to define each person and his/her interests and then serve ads based on these interests.
The amount of information they get from knowing what news each person follows and in what way is enormously valuable to google.
Let's say for the sake of argument that's true. So what? Newspaper X objects, removes itself, and Google still learns this because the end user _still_ searches for news and still clicks on results. Newspaper X, Y, Z object, there are a dozen more behind them. Let's say all of them collectively object, and Google News can't show news results for Brazil - an unlikely scenario. What will end users do when they can't see the headlines all on one page? They will still use conventional search to look for new, so Google still learns user preference.
Your whole line of argument is worthless. In fact, it's worse than that, it's backwards, because - and take a seat because this is really going to blow your mind - if Google knows what type of news you're likely to be interested in it can do a better job of getting you to news sites that serve that content, meaning you spend more time on their pages and perhaps monetize better (e.g. through ads or subscriptions). Yes, Google will deliver a higher "quality" user to you.
Maybe you should stop misrepresenting the situation.
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It would be worthless if there was an alternative to google. Because then users would switch to this alternative and see all their old sites.
The concept you're missing here is known as "leveraging a monopoly".
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Just like those hypothetical operating systems like linux and osx, right? I wonder why microsoft is a convicted monopolist?
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Agree on all points. Google gains large amounts of personal data on its users from news.google.com. That is its core business. It obviously doesn't want to lose it, but it also doesn't want to pay for it either.
In the end, this will be an interesting precedent regardless of outcome. Both parties will have very good arguments to bring to the table.
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we certainly don't want fewer sources of opinion
I do. They can shove their opinions, just give me the facts and I'll make up my own opinions.
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Re:Let them (Score:4, Informative)
They should pay Google on a per-click-through basis for the advertising, surely? After all, Google just provides a thumbnail, a headline and the first sentence.
So.... (Score:3)
I suppose Slashdot should pay someone for bringing us this story then?
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Well, we certainly don't want fewer sources of opinion
somehow, i don't think the world is in danger of having too few opinions.
Re:Let them watch television. (Score:2)
I use the favorites button on my browser, so I don't have to remember anything. If I want to be bold, I can open up the home pages of all my news sites at once.
An outlier like myself means nothing to these corporations, OTOH, and hardly anybody seems willfully informed by the web anyway.
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My bet would be something like what happened with me. I click on stories from a few news sites through news.google.com and find myself returning to these sites enough that I eventually just bookmark them.
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Here is what is really going to happen.
The people the News agencies are worried about are already coming through Google news.
They will continue to look at Google News and not even notice that the results of the stuff they are looking for do not have Brazilian newspapers in them.
They will just see links to places that have the content they are looking for and they will go there.
Most of the internet cows will not even notice that Brazilian News organizations are no longer relevant to the larger conversations
Re:Let them (Score:5, Insightful)
They'll see what happens when their visits drop. People can't be expected to remember every paper that there is and go to each individual site when attempting to find a specific story. This will only be to the papers' detriment.
I suspect that, just as everyone is above average and thinks that their children are atypically cute, all the newspapers harbor the dream that they will beat the odds and get to be a 'Portal' for all those precious consumer eyeballs, just like Yahoo or AOL sometime before the turn of the millennium, rather than bleeding subscribers or contributing a sentence or two of scrapings to people's search results...
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It's funny they don't see search engines as a form of advertising.
Or maybe they are clever and thinking "Hey! Let's have our advertisers pay us!"
Honestly, let the papers do this. Those who don't will get more business and those that do can fuck off out of business, which seems win-win to me.
That's not the reason to let them. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not the reason to let them. If they block Google, then that is their right. At least they're not demanding Google pay to link.
Block Google, enter a robots.txt, make ignoring robots.txt a copyright offence, whatever.
They're entitled to do so.
They're not entitled to rework the entire internet because they don't like how it operates.
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To me, the whole thing to me sounds really arrogant. "Our paper is so popular that we don't need Google!" Yeah, famous last words. If you're not on Google these days, you had may as well be invisible.
Re:Let them (Score:5, Insightful)
Particularly when you boil the situation down to the most basic premise - people are still visiting their site. They're literally made at Google for making it too easy for people to find what they actually WANT from that site. They want the users to have to wade through their own poor interface for a given amount of time - seeing their ads - before they finally find the content.
Forcing your customers into a more difficult path for your own benefit with no incentive to them will not work well. Never has, never will.
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If the small sites stay on Google they will actually do better than before.
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Indeed. To a large degree I don't even CARE what site news comes from. I'm just looking for some general info. Google News lets me find that via a search and that's all that matters. No matter how many leave, there will likely always be enough to provide what I need. That's part of the problem with news agencies anyways - aside from very local news they're all repeating the same information. There's WAY too much redundancy there to maintain in this day and age.
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They'll see what happens when their visits drop.
That actually won't happen. None of the sites mentioned are actually blocking Google from indexing their sites. They may have stopped providing nicely formatted headlines to Google News, but they haven't dared blocking Google to those same articles with a robots.txt through their online sites (which essentially contains the same newspaper content, plus some extra blog content which does not normally appear in the official version of their newspapers).
Essentially, they're hoping to lead a Worldwide revolt, h
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Hmm, if close to all the Brazilian newspapers (or enough of the ones Brazilians care about) are exiting Google because the "National Association of Newspapers in Brazil" (ANJ) said to, what are people looking for Brazilian newspapers going to do? If the ANJ controls the supply, it effects a monopoly on domestic Brazilian news and so it's a dubious assumption that demand will simply switch to a competitor or substitute paper, because there isn't necessarily one left on Google.
I'm not sure that international
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They'd lose no revenue. No ads on google news. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or have you never been on there?
NO ADVERTS.
Google *Search* has adverts. Google *News* doesn't.
So shutting down Google News will not lose ANY clicking on placed ads.
Idiot.
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Perhaps, but all of the traffic that Google funnels their way does provide the papers with income. This sounds like the papers are shooting themselves in the foot.
The newspaper industry has qualified for the highest rank on the shooting-yourself-in-the-foot range.
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Why do you assume news sites would be fucked if Google news shut down? Do you really think people can't remember CNN.com, bbc.com, foxnews.com, aljazeera.com, bostonglobe.com, wallstreetjournal.com, washingtonpost.com, etc?
they'd be f***** because people don't do that. they go to google for news, and will keep doing it. the difference will be that they won't get results from the agencies that opt-out, and those agencies will get zero revenue from click throughs.
i could care less if all of those organizations drop out of google news. there are a million smaller organizations waiting to take their place that are hungry for the clicks. news is a commodity. you can get it from cnn.com or some indie organizations. it matters littl
My god! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My god! (Score:5, Funny)
Think of it as a multiple of Library of Congress stuffed with Kim Kardashian's butt cheeks . . .
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It's a triangular shaped topiary.
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How many is a brazilian?!
I don't know. Evidently, that's Victoria's secret.
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News Corp already tried this and failed. (Score:5, Informative)
Rupert Murdoch blasted Google in the past for featuring his news sites and had them removed. Yet recently, he reversed his decision: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/9566353/Rupert-Murdoch-backs-down-in-war-with-parasite-Google.html
there's an available solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Robots.txt. You can prohibit google or any reputable search engine from indexing your content.
The POINT of the HTTP protocol is to serve data, but if you don't wanna, it's your machine that gives the data over. It doesn't have to do that. You have full control over that via several different means, from robots.txt to a paywall. There are blacklists and whitelists - what gets given out is under the control of the serving system. It seems a bit insane to voluntarily reply to a request for data, and then get mad that the other side saw the data. If you don't want them to see it, don't offer it up via a protocol whose entire purpose is to transfer data from a server to a requesting machine.
The internet could never have grown as it did if in the beginning everyone was going to subvert the intent of the technical aspects of it.
Re:there's an available solution (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, but Robots.txt doesn't allow you to have it both ways.
For, um, totally reasonable reasons that I don't feel obliged to articulate right now, I deserve both the exposure of being listed by Google and payment from Google for listing me!
Sure, I could tell my server nerd to make the changes necessary to stop my content from being 'stolen' in about 30 seconds; but that would deny me the exposure that is my natural right...
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Hmm. They appear to want a dumbed down search engine, where it provides a link and says "what you are looking for might be on this site, but you'll have to use their crappy built-in search and work to find it, instead us of just linking directly to it." Or they want Google to pay them for having identical content ("We put an AP article up like 3,000 other news sites! We deserve some money! Gimme gimme!"). This is what happens when you let journalists on the web -> they have no grasp or understanding of h
It is a curious problem (Score:2, Insightful)
1. They gain far more traffic to article pages than they lose from their homepage.
2. Their homepages are not as inviting as google's - learn from that. Figure out why. Is it
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"people are less likely than ever to bother checking cnn.com vs going directly to google news. "
false. Google news doesn't give you the whole story only a headline and a sentence or two.
Have you ever been to google news?
https://news.google.com/ [google.com]
"The only way to see the newspaper's side is if you imagine someone make a faux cnn homepage - listing only cnn articles and putting up advertising. That would seem fishy, wouldn't it?"
yes, but that's not happening here, so it isn't relevant.
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2. Their homepages are not as inviting as google's - learn from that. Figure out why. Is it just choice, or is there more to it?
This is the big one. I like to read news online, though I'm in the US. Every so-called new site I've looked, except Google News, is basically worthless. ABC News, CNN, Fox News, CBS News, newspapers, etc. are useless to me. I wan to see, at a glance, a decent number of stories covering a rather broad set of topics. Most sites show you like 10 headlines and tons of other crap. I can't even figure out how to get real news on these sites. Interestingly, most of these sites' mobile versions are far more informa
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Let me see if I've got this right... (Score:4, Informative)
The newspapers believe that they have a right to force me to pay for telling someone else that their paper carries a story and what page it's on? I... can't think of a single bit of law supporting that position, anywhere. They certainly have the right to keep me from photocopying their story and handing it out to people, but "the right to be the only entity who can tell others the work exists" isn't something I find anywhere in copyright law.
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Those who want less profits are those who are seeking less profits. They don't quite know that what they want is less profits, but that will be the result of the actions they want to take.
Maybe this is what we need (Score:3)
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The usual way to do so is called "gossip".
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Maybe this will prompt someone to come up with a better way to collect and distribute the news to people without charge.
It is called Twitter, enjoy...of course it still costs you a device, connectivity charge, and eventually whatever monetizing means Twitter comes up with.
We should not need to pay to find out what is going on in the world around us.
You do not need to pay, go out in the world and get it yourself.
Now if you expect someone to bring it to you on a platter with any level of quality, and reliability, trustworthiness then it will come at a cost.
That cost may be tax dollars in your socialist society that feeds, clothes, bathes, and medicates you, or from advertising views or pay-walls.
Of
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My suggestion is not to do that. Instead, charge. Charge me one or two pennies for your article. Give me the first paragraph and then *click* for a penny or two, or even less than a penny if you have high volume.
The *click* is the hard part, technologically.
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I agree, information should be freely accessible.
We may disagree though on how that should be accomplished.
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Really? Because the REAL journalists, not retarded bloggers, don't need to eat and have a home?
Paying one way or another for services rendered is standard and entirely acceptable. Stop being such a fucking leech.
Shame I used up my mod points earlier. +1 obvious. Of course, even "real" journalists are more often than not being paid to bias the news one way or the other. The difference between them and bloggers seems to be getting smaller and smaller every day.
There are biased news everywhere, anyhow (Score:3)
look at this article:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57535804/confrontation-may-loom-in-waters-off-israel/ [cbsnews.com]
and check how many American news sites report on it via Google:
http://www.google.com/news?q=Ship+to+Gaza+Estelle&lr=English&hl=en [google.com]
Very very few. So, maybe the Brazilian news sites have something to hide? Filtered news is this news?
It's not a bad system IMO (Score:3)
Newspaper gets worldwide exposure which drives (increases) existing ad revenue/views
News companies should be elated about this service, they are basically getting exposure and increased revenue from google's search product without having to pay Google a dime.
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I disagree.
It seems odd to me that the bulk of the money in the NEWS business would go to news aggregators, as opposed to those who are reporting the news in the first place. I think we would get higher quality news, including more exposes, etc. if we could figure out how to fix this oddity.
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What makes you think the bulk of the money is going to aggregators?
The only money the aggregator makes is the one from people who click on the ads on the aggregation page.
If the aggregated stories are interesting you expect people will click on the stories instead of the ads (after all it's not an Ad aggregation page...).
And then they are on the newspaper's website and if they click on ads there the aggregator doesn't make a dime.
So basically the only way the aggregator makes the bulk of the money is if the
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I go to googles news page, I see a story headline, I click the little arrow to find who all is reporting the story, and I then follow links directly to the news sites story.
How is this not saving the news companies money?
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By giving news company far less hits, and as a result, far less ad impressions than in situation where user would come from it's own main page rather then google's.
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Ok, so since they serve up fewer web pages they are loosing money?
I'm not talking potential money involving things I will not do such as viewing the news organizations main page. That is like when Congress including the cost saving of changing daylight savings on the economy to counter the cost of something stupid they wanted.
And besides, I use an ad-blocker so I wouldn't be seeing the ads anyway.
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bah, losing not loosing.
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The answer to your question is "Yes".
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They appear to want you to spend several minutes in frustration using a crappy WordPress search engine to find the one article you came for, and hopefully accidentally open a dozen others (more clicks).
what's really being asked for (Score:2)
robots.txt (Score:3)
If you don't like it then stop whining and pull yourselves from google. You have the power don't pretend you don't or don't know that you do.
What is the point of whining when a few lines added to a single text file will solve *all* of your problems?
Traditional jounalism still out of touch (Score:2)
The entire news business is having trouble because their previous position as the gatekeepers to news is and will now always be lost to them. More or less every rule and instinct they have learned during their careers is now out of sync with the reality of how the Internet works. They aren't bad, they just don't understand the way forward. That is why they wrongly attack the search engines, they understand their gatekeeper position is lost, but they don't really know how to cope yet. To an extent search
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Traditionally media has been a "fourth pillar" of our division of power, keeping check on corruption and giving people information to use for wielding power in democratic process.
And now comes the billion dollar question. Old system relied on "gatekeeping of the news" to finance this massive task. How do you plan to finance it if this model is defunct, or is your opinion that our governance and awareness of the public good enough completely without non-governmental/interest group funded press?
Media today ha
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It is a cop out to say defining the problem is the first step in addressing it? The issue is more about news organizations understanding where they actually have a value added contribution, and also understanding that their relationship to the public and the news makers has drastically changed. For example, maybe you don’t need to send very many journalists to another country to report on an uprising when rebels can tweet and send videos themselves, or ex-pats can, and the government in power too!
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Sounds about right. I mean, it's 2012, and only now is Newsweek transitioning to a web only format.
To say that the journalists are a little behind, technologically speaking, is to say that we don't use oil lamps as our primary source of light any-more.
So the Brazilian media show that robots.txt works. (Score:2)
And any paper that doesn't want to be indexed can tell Google "Pay us money or we'll block your spider." So why do the papers need laws requiring Google to pay them when they already have the means at hand to require payment themselves?
The problems (Score:2)
Problem 2) An ad shown in search results is worth more than an ad shown on a newspaper's home page. If I search for cars in google news then I may be interested in buying a car. If I click through to a newpaper article about cars then
Can google just pay AP (Score:2)
and post the articles on Google news. Except for local news most newspapers recycle the same fucking articles. You got 100's of site around the globe posting the same thing. Google should just pay for it, post it and put up ads and let the papers rot away.
What's really amazing is how the papers have had time since what 1999/2000 to figure out new business plans to include the internet and none of these people could figure out what to do?
Dont let the web traffic hit you on the way out... (Score:2)
Beware the law of unintended consequences (Score:2)
These guys are shooting their own feet off
First the left and then the right, some do it the other way around.
Google should remove them ASAP and charge them a fee to re-index them...
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Maybe Google figured out that for you it makes you more likely to click through if they show you right wing headlines?
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Consider why google runs news.google.com. It can't be ad revenue from the site, because that particular google site has no ads.
Answer lies in core function of google's official mission - to index everything as recognisably as possible and sell this information in various forms to its clientele. In this case, they get detailed information on what news its main product follows and how. This will often let them build a very good personal profile on many subjects that its customers would be interested in, such