Eric Schmidt at The Wall Street Journal wrote a very insightgful opinion article about How Google Can Help Newspapers:
With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame. Much of their anger is currently directed at Google, whom many executives view as getting all the benefit from the business relationship without giving much in return. The facts, I believe, suggest otherwise.
Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free. In terms of copyright, another bone of contention, we only show a headline and a couple of lines from each story. If readers want to read on they have to click through to the newspaper’s Web site. (The exception are stories we host through a licensing agreement with news services.) And if they wish, publishers can remove their content from our search index, or from Google News.
The claim that we’re making big profits on the back of newspapers also misrepresents the reality. In search, we make our money primarily from advertisements for products. Someone types in digital camera and gets ads for digital cameras. A typical news search—for Afghanistan, say—may generate few if any ads. The revenue generated from the ads shown alongside news search queries is a tiny fraction of our search revenue.
It’s understandable to look to find someone else to blame. But as Rupert Murdoch has said, it is complacency caused by past monopolies, not technology, that has been the real threat to the news industry.
Schmidt reminds us that “Video didn’t kill the radio star, and the Internet won’t destroy news organizations. It will foster a new, digital business model.” Which is absolutely spot on. The future of media is arriving and it’s time for the old media channels to adapt to a new world. He also wants to reassure big news that google is there to help, not hinder that change. Remember, change is generally good and change with a giant like google willing to lend a hand is even better.
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I must say and I know that everyone agrees that change is inevitable. Change is something we cannot avoid but it is something that we can adapt. Other than that, if that change will benefit us more, then more likely, we can accept the change.
In this situation of the newspaper vs. google, I can say that the old media (newspaper) must adapt to new media (google). It doesn’t specifically mean kill the newspaper but just add some new things to give more appeal to readers. Like invent something like an electronic newspaper and google will provide the news wherein the services of google can be used. With that, it can be environment friendly since it can save millions or even billions of trees and ink (both b/w and colored). Companies should also think that it is not forever we can use mother nature to bring us profit and information since we are just borrowing our resources. And since it’s the rise of the technology generation, we should create / invent more forms of information knowledge so that people will also adapt to the change and will not stay forever of “what used to be”.
Google needs to adapt to newer media (Twitter) and it is working hard at it… why don’t the papers work at hard? Denial.
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