Sam Zell told a group at Stanford University that Tribune and other newspaper publishers should stop giving their content to Google and other search sites. “If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?” he asked. “Not very.” Meanwhile last week, Google settled a lawsuit with Agence France-Presse over Google News. Financial details were not disclosed, and AFP headlines, summaries and photos will return to Google News — as well as some form of extended content that goes above and beyond regular listings. “This will probably be a template for others,” writes Rafat Ali in PaidContent.
Adds James in comments: “How do I occasionally stumble across interesting newspaper content? By finding things on Google. So if the newspaper blocks Google in their robots.txt file, I will never find their stuff, and they will never get the revenue I would bring them with my visit. So if they leave Google, they loose. Making your paper an obscure backwater on the web does not seem to be a great route to success. Google enables papers much more than papers enable Google.”
Adds Joel: “Today I was told about an article in the newspaper, I went to the newspaper’s site and couldn’t find it. I went to Google News and did the same search and found it. Does he not see how Google actually helped me find a article on his own websites. The shear stupidity of these people never fails to amaze me.”
