Markets

Reacting to Google's Lifeline as if it Were a Torpedo

By David Weir

Updated on: September 15, 2008 / 7:06 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

Every now and again, someone inside the newspaper business utters something so patently idiotic about what's responsible for his industry's downfall that yours truly gets angry and feels compelled to set the record straight.

The current example is one Andrew Smith of the Dallas Morning News, who objects to Google's massive News Archive Search effort that has the potential to vastly expand public access to newspaper archives. Smith penned what he no doubt thought was a wise-ass quip: "It's nice to know that the company that's putting us newspapers out of business will at least preserve our memory."
Nobody whose been paying attention is laughing, because way too much of any serious journalist's career has already been spent in libraries, rolling through ancient microfiche systems to locate old news stories. It is most definitely neither glamorous nor fun. By contrast, the idea of accessing all of this historical data on a laptop is one of the most exciting developments for journalists in the digital era.

Besides, Smith is dead-wrong in his analysis in every single way:

Google says it seeks the permission of publishers before digitizing its archives.
The search company is bearing all the costs of the digitizing project, which will be substantial.
Google also says the great majority of the ad revenue earned off of these archives will go to the publishers.
The public will get free access to the archives.
The newspaper companies may finally realize that a better online business model is monetizing archives through ad revenue than their age-old method -- subscriptions.
Most importantly, Google is not putting newspapers out of business. It is saving them.

The truth is that Google effort to be essentially a public service, as well as a potential boon for the newspaper companies. In the current world, newspapers are based on the instant gratification model of content -- use it and then throw it away. The whole experience is hopelessly wasteful, especially when you consider how many trees are sacrificed for this messy purpose.

A better way to view themselves would be as icebergs, with the tip of their vast content visible above water (today's headlines) but by far the largest and most valuable part of their product lying below the surface. The danger is that there are too many Andrew Smiths out there, clueless, out of touch and unable to recognize a life raft even when they are drowning and it's thrown directly to them.