A day after the editor of The Wall Street Journal referred to online news aggregators--particularly Google and its Google News product--as "parasites or tech tapeworms," and the chairman of the Associated Press announced an initiative to protect print media content from infringing use online, Google has fired back in a blog.
The gist of Tuesday's blog post, penned by Google associate general counsel Alexander Macgillivray: don't point fingers at us.
"We show snippets and links under the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the United States Copyright Act," he wrote. "Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rightsholder, in this case newspaper or wire service, to remove their content from our index--all they have to do is ask us or implement simple technical standards."
As for the AP, Macgillivray noted that Google already pays the wire service to reprint its articles and photographs. A dispute several years ago led to this agreement.
Of course, Google News is far from the only aggregator out there. Digg, Drudge Report, and the Huffington Post are also big players. But Google is unquestionably at the top.
For the past few years, as many mainstream media outlets (particularly on the print side) began to lose revenue, influence, and readership, some of them had a pretty clear message: blame Google. At the same time, Viacom still has a billion-dollar lawsuit against Google's YouTube over pirated video content. And much of the publishing industry is far from signing on to Google's book digitization initiative.
With struggling newspapers in a panic over whether offering content online for free might not have been such a good idea in the first place, Google--the ultimate source of free content--is an even easier target.
But Google says it's part of the solution, not the problem, and insists that its search and aggregation products only serve to help drive traffic to online news sites.
"Users like me are sent from different Google sites to newspaper websites at a rate of more than a billion clicks per month," Macgillivray said in his post. "These clicks go to news publishers large and small, domestic and international--day and night."
The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is one of those exclusive, highbrow affairs with a guest list tighter than your belt after a pie-eating contest. But social network MySpace is leveling out the playing field by partnering with the Wall Street Journal for a competition called "MySpace Journal," in which an aspiring "citizen journalist" will be awarded the chance to attend the summit later this month.
MySpace is now accepting video submissions in which entrants explain their reasons for wanting to attend and be a member of the Davos press corps. One winner, chosen by a panel of industry figureheads that includes pundit and Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe, will receive an all-expenses paid trip, a coveted press pass, and a blog on MySpace that will also be syndicated to The Wall Street Journal's Web site.
They probably don't attract the same demographic, but MySpace and the Journal have something big in common: Both are owned by the Rupert Murdoch-helmed media conglomerate News Corp.
MySpace might be better known for music promotion than international affairs, but the social network showed off its civic colors quite a bit during last fall's presidential campaign. A similar "citizen journalism" competition was conducted in partnership with NBC, and a series of candidate dialogues were broadcast in conjunction with MTV.
Social-news company Loomia announced Wednesday that it has launched a new application called SeenThis, which connects news sites with social-networking sites so users can learn what their people on their friends' lists have been reading. Loomia's inaugural partners in SeenThis are The Wall Street Journal, NBC Universal, and CNET Networks, parent company of CNET News.com.
Like many other "recommendation engines," Loomia's technology can suggest content items to a reader based on what he or she has already viewed. SeenThis goes a step further by using social-networking sites' APIs--the one that the current content partners are using is Facebook--to gather what people on a reader's friends' list or within his or her regional, company, or school networks have been viewing on a partner site. So, for example, a WSJ.com reader might see that eight people from his Facebook friends list have read the latest doomsday story about the housing crisis, or that members of his alumni network on Facebook have been browsing the travel section.
CNET Networks will be using SeenThis on its business news properties: BNET, TechRepublic, and ZDNet. NBC Universal, meanwhile, will focus on video so that viewers can learn which NBC.com videos their social-networking contacts have been viewing.
Perhaps because of the brouhaha that surrounded Facebook's Beacon advertising program, Loomia has stressed that SeenThis is opt-in only. A Facebook user, for example, has to install the SeenThis application before it starts tracking habits on partner sites.
The release from Loomia on Wednesday hinted that SeenThis will expand to other social networks as time goes on.
Update 4:20 a.m. Wednesday: Information from a Digg representative has been added.
Kevin Rose, founder of social news aggregator Digg, posted a quick blog entry on Tuesday night about his site's new relationship with Rupert Murdoch's latest accessory, The Wall Street Journal.
"The Wall Street Journal online is adding Digg buttons across the entire site, and you'll now have full (free) access to the articles submitted to Digg," Rose wrote. "The Digg buttons have started appearing on WSJ.com articles tonight."
The "full free access" part is key. While speaking to investors in Australia, News Corp. mogul Murdoch said this week that he planned to release the Journal's Web site from its paid-subscription mode. When the New York Times eliminated premium content earlier this fall, the Journal became one of the lone holdouts.
It looks like the Digg deal is some sort of exclusive arrangement. This is not an exclusive deal, according to a Digg representative--though it sure sounds like one: "You'll notice that it is the only button on their site," a quick heads-up e-mail from a Digg PR rep read in regards to Rose's blog post. In other words, the likes of Digg rival Reddit and bookmarking site Delicious aren't represented.
But more than anything, it's also fuel for the fire. Digg has been continually talked up as a potential acquisition target. And in recent weeks a rumor began to float that the site would soon be sold for $300 million to 400 million to a "major media player." Expect this Wall Street Journal arrangement to result in more than a few rumors that Digg is close to a News Corp. buy.
Whether that's actually true, well, we don't know yet.
Note: This story was updated at 6:00 a.m. PDT to include a correction from a New York Times representative regarding TimesSelect subscriber figures cited by the New York Post.
Citing anonymous sources, the New York Post has reported that rival Manhattan paper The New York Times is planning to do away with TimesSelect, the subscription-only content on its NYTimes.com Web site. According to the article by Holly M. Sanders, the main obstacle at the moment is reconfiguring the site's software.
A Times representative told CNET News.com that the company isn't releasing any statement beyond: "We continue to evaluate the best approach for NYTimes.com." The representative did point out, however, that the Post had made an error: Sanders' article said that the number of TimesSelect subscribers had fallen from 224,000 in April to slightly over 221,000 in June. According to the Times, TimesSelect subscriber numbers have actually risen from 220,090 in April to 224,580 in June.
The demise of TimesSelect, which has been in operation since 2005 and puts archived content as well as popular opinion pieces behind a subscription wall, has been rumored for some time among New York media circles. Adding fuel to the fire is News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch. When speaking about his decision to purchase Wall Street Journal company Dow Jones, he suggested that the Journal might free up its own premium content.
New-media pundits have typically been very critical of TimesSelect, considering it a disadvantage for the legendary publication to be locking up so much content, particularly opinion pieces by well-known writers. "By cutting stars like Tom Friedman and Frank Rich off from the rest of the Internet," Peter Kafka of the Silicon Alley Insider commented in July, "the Times has diminished its (and their) influence--and helped create room for upstarts like The Huffington Post to step in."
Currently, TimesSelect subscribers pay $7.95 per month, or $49.95 per year, for access to op-ed columnists, archives dating back to 1851, extra multimedia features, and occasional access to the Sunday paper's articles before they are made available for free or in print.
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