By Travis Walters
Rupert Murdoch has recently laid the blame of the failing newspaper industry at the feet of Google. He claims that Google is stealing their content because they index it and send people to it when they’re looking for it. In a breathtaking display of the kind of thinking that’s not going to remedy the situation, he’s decided to remove all News Corp. sites from Google.
I know newspaper men and women are scared of the Internet. Why shouldn’t they be? They dropped the ball, seemingly on purpose, and then beat it mercilessly with sticks hoping it would go away. But, the ball didn’t.
The ball got up, rounded up some friends, and came back.
If our industry is to survive, we must embrace the future and adapt accordingly. Murdoch, for his part, doesn’t think search engines are thieves if they pay for stuff. He’s enlisted Microsoft to de-index News Corp., and Microsoft will likely pay News Corp. untold sums of money to be able to list their content on their latest attempt to beat Google, dubbed Bing. Setting aside the potentially damaging precedent this sets, I don’t think it will work.
Microsoft has tried to compete against Google several times. They had MSN Search, which became Live, and then Live became Bing. Bing isn’t doing well. A search for my name on Bing brings up Travis Walton, a man claimed to have been abducted by a UFO.
Walton and Walters are close, though. Several of the letters are the same.
I’m actually excited about this because when people search for something provided by News Corp. on Bing, they’ll never find it. And, that’s just how it should be.
But the problem for the industry remains. How will they make money? The unquantifiable and anonymous group known as “some” say that my generation expects to get the news for free. Just as we expected to get music for free? The music that we now gladly pay for on iTunes and other digital outlets after the industry caught up?
Even though the newspaper industry should have seen the Internet coming, they didn’t. And, finding a pay model that will work on the Web should be their highest priority or they’ll fail. Having search engines pay to index your content is one way, I suppose, but not a sustainable way.
I might suggest looking at the micro-transactions that have made iTunes so popular. My generation likes those.
