@Society of Editors: Google focus is ‘a distraction’

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 November 2006 at 11:15
Tags: Journalism

Anthony Mayfield responds to Andrew Neil’s speech last night:

In the heads of Neil and a significant number of others they maybe imagine that Google has ads on Google News: it doesn’t. Yet. I think they imagine that newspaper and magazine content is the most prominent and widely used content for people searching on Google - it’s not.

…

Smart editors, journalists and publishers need to think bigger about how their organisations will need to change. Neil’s right - there are massive opportunities - there always are for smart people and companies  in times of disruption and change. Hoping Google will sort it all out for you is a distraction.

Sounds about right. Just this summer, Google principle scientist Khrisha Barat, the creator of the news aggregator, said that there “no immediate plans to monetise Google News”.

Google is probably well aware of the uproar that any attempt to monetise Google News would cause. Times editor Robert Thomson, for example, recently said that an attempt to use Times Online content commercially without driving traffic to the site would reverse his broadly pro-Google position.
The real issue with Google from some publishers’ point of view is probably not Google News, but rather Google’s canonical web search — which does carry both links to news web sites and advertisements.

Tags: Journalism