Google & Journalism
Started by News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch, Wall Street Journal and Associated Press then joined the “war” against Google. It was not that surprised because Record Industry also had such issue before.
All the conflicts eventually came down to one: who is responsible for feeding a moribund industry? Or we could say “Is Henry Fort responsible for the decline of cab service?”
Well, it seems that it’s quite reasonable that journalism got p****d off: Google indexed our content, so you see, our ad revenue keeps declining while Google’s revenue gaining. Its Google took away the money that belongs to us! Google responds, if you do not want your content got indexed, easy! Just add a few lines of code to your robots.txt. But but but, Murdoch would never do that! He wants both the traffic and income of Google. So what he really meant was Google, as the biggest internet firm, has the responsibility to feed the moribund journalism.
But WTF?! How come that its Google’s mistake if the journalism was unable to keep pace with times?!
All doing the journalism, but I never heard TechCrunch or Read/Write Web blaming Google for that. It’s true that internet has destroyed many used-to-be stable business structures, meanwhile, brought up quite a few new business structures. Some people just keep their eyes on Google, rather than focus on how to gain more users holding the mouse! If the non-commercial Wiki could develop so well, then I could only say something just deserves death.
I don’t think we won’t have music to listen to if the Record Industry were dead; or we won’t have news to watch if newspaper were gone! If they just could not survive in the digital age or keep imputing all faults and wrongs on others, then just let them die.
It’s not that awful if traditional journalism were dead, because its death would set apart more opportunities. The strong always succeeds; the weakest goes to the wall.