By Sandra Ha
The battle between old and new media is now in action. Starting from the advent of search engines before the 21st century, everybody saw this battle coming. Internationally, there is a fierce ongoing dispute between newspapers and Google. According to the newspaper industry, Google is literally taking over the news. On the contrary, officials of Google assert that Google’s existence helps the old media to at least maintain its remaining readership. With new strategies implemented, this war is heading toward the next battlefield which will result in much more causalities once it goes wrong.
Everything started when Rupert Murdoch, a media mogul who is the CEO of News Corporation, pulled his newspapers from Google’s search results in 2010. He claimed that the headline and two line excerpts summarizing print articles on the front page of Google News were causing less and less people to actually click the links to read the entire article. If you go into the front page of Google News, there are headlines that pretty much give a good idea of what the news will be about. The site even provides two line summaries which make it even less likely that people will want to click to see the real details. Mr. Murdoch accused Google News of damaging media’s way of generating revenue from online advertisements and required payments for having its news articles in the search results. Google’s rejection of this proposal led Mr. Murdoch to withdraw his newspapers from Google search results.
This decision, surprisingly, negatively influenced his news industry because most of the viewers, in fact, search Google to get into most of the news sources. If newspapers from Mr. Murdoch’s empire do not show up in the search results, people simply go to other newspapers that were available. Therefore, in September, Mr. Murdoch decided to provide headlines and excerpts to Google News again—returning back to the previous state.
The Second Media War
Although the first war between newspapers and Google ended in favor of Google, the second war seems to be a neck-and-neck match. The war is no longer national, but spreading out to be a multinational one. In Germany, politicians are proposing a bill that guarantees copyright protection to excerpts of newspaper articles exposed in search engines’ results, allowing publishers to gather payment from the related search engines. This bill is also being discussed in Italy, France, Austria, and Switzerland as well. It will go through full-scale discussions from this month and could be implemented in as early as next morning. In France, President Francois Hollande directly addressed Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, warning that if Google did not meet the compensation demands of French newspapers, the French National Assembly could pass a law similar to the German one. In order to reclaim their declining dominance, newspapers are literally joining forces to establish a collective society.
Some newspapers have been successful in this battle. In Belgium, a chain of newspapers filed a lawsuit against Google for news copyright infringement and won after a long battle. Google has announced that the company will appeal immediately after the verdict, but it is highly probable that the company will have to compensate the damages. Outside of Europe, Brazilian newspapers withdrew their articles from Google News. By developing other ways to access to the news articles, Brazilian newspapers have not suffered from any palpable damages – online hits only decreased by 5%.
Responding to fierce attacks of these newly joined alliances, team Google is attacking in its own way. The typical Google strategy is simply not posting newspaper articles in the search results when the newspapers demand such payments. This action significantly decreases the revenue of online advertisements because less people are likely to access to the news websites. That was how Google silenced a number of newspaper companies in the past years. Simple statistics are also on Google’s side. Google leads 4 billion clicks to news websites per month–about 75% of Google News readers click in to read the full article in the actual websites. Therefore, Google claims that its very existence is helping the sustenance of newspapers.
What is the point of the War anyway?
Exactly, where is the war going toward? Even though, hypothetically, Google meets all of the compensations demanded by the newspapers, the cause of their ever-shrinking revenue is not because of Google. In France, the $1.54 billion government subsidies awarded to media companies are not helping any single national newspaper to go out of deficit. In 2011, global newspaper advertising revenue barely reached $76 billion, a 41% decrease since 2007. In this trend, online advertising is not even close to the right solution. Many of the online advertisements are not profitable as printed advertisements, as they remain undefended to ad-blocking software. In spite of the rigorous increase in online advertisements, online ads only amounted to 2.2% of newspapers’ advertising revenues last year. Google cannot be the sole cause of this decline.
Maybe it is time to accept the simple truth: old media needs some CPR.
How about Expresso?
Expresso is definitely in the same boat as print media, but it has a different nemesis: Facebook. As a GLP newspaper, Expresso not only provides a succinct outlook of GLP life, but also delineates important issues happening around the world. However, it seems like Facebook is serving the same role for a lot of students. Sometimes, the paparazzi photos in the newspaper were found on Facebook before the issue was published. Sometimes, the events described in articles were vigorously discussed much before on someone else’s wall. Sometimes, the print media seems to be so obsolete compared to other top-notched technologies that are updated the moment you scroll the bar with your finger.
Expresso is not a revenue generating newspaper–we write and we pay, so advertisements or subscription fees are far from the real issue. Our paper’s objective is to provide your news, providing an outlook of a life that all of the GLP students know and experience. Thus, it is crucial that this newspaper continues to be relatable and riveting at the same time. The biggest difference Expresso has from all of the new media outlets is that we strive to provide the best conversation that could happen inside GLP. Reporters spend their entire weekend working on articles that show their fields of interests and also gather details to provide the best overview of GLP events. This is why there is even a movement in domestic class modeling Expresso to publish a Kuknaeban newspaper. As a print media, Expresso is finding its own way to coexist with the influx of new media. This is why Expresso survived well and will survive for a very long time.
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