AP and News Corp.: Wrong About Google

Asking Web companies to pay up for content won't fix a business model that Old Media should have remedied a long time ago

By Sarah Lacy

I'd like to open this column with an apology to the Internet on behalf of reasonable members of the traditional media.

Internet: It is not your fault that our business models are slowly dying, that we resisted the Web for so long, and that we then did a mediocre job of adapting our products to it. Your large portals and search engines like Google (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO), aggregation services like Techmeme and Digg, and your countless blogs have been very kind in sending us so much traffic at no charge over the years. We know well that traffic is currency online. That's why we spend so much time squeezing any remotely relevant ticker into a story, appending "Digg this" buttons to pages, and doing whatever we can to optimize our stories to get the most search traffic possible.

You've done your part to help save us, Internet, and we appreciate it. You've given us an immediacy and two-way connection with readers we wouldn't have had otherwise. We can now measure which stories resonate with readers the most—no expensive surveys and focus groups necessary! You've even made all those ridiculously high costs of paper and printing obsolete. It's not your fault we haven't yet found a way to monetize it or the gumption to cut our costly print operations sufficiently to make new business models viable.

Of course, if you've read the headlines this month, you understand why I'm writing this note. A once proud, robust industry that should be concerning itself with speaking truth to power is spending much of its time whining. Old Media has largely failed to join the ranks of companies profiting from the Web. Instead, it's trying to browbeat those companies into subsidizing its own money-losing operations.

Policing the Web

Consider the latest chapter of the Associated Press' bizarre anti-Internet saga. The news organization now says it will police the Web for what it calls "misappropriation" of news content, in hopes of forcing sites that link to news stories to share revenue with creators of that content. Details are still unclear. In an interview with BusinessWeek, Tom Curley, the chief executive officer of AP, elaborated on the AP's plan to build its own news aggregation pages, creating something of an alternative to Google. Good luck with that.

The AP's rant followed News Corp. (NWS) CEO Rupert Murdoch telling Forbes that Google should have to start paying for linking to News Corp. content. What's next? Charging Twitter for the privilege of all those editors and reporters who try to drum up interest in their articles via Tweets? Forbes called Murdoch's anger "understandable." Really? Then please explain it to me. From where I stand, traditional media has only itself to be angry with.