IT IS hard to work out which cliché best suits the position of News Ltd, and indeed many newspaper companies. Is it between a rock and a hard place or is in on the horns of a dilemma?
News Ltd boss Rupert Murdoch is annoyed that Google and other search engines “steal” News Ltd content when they post results from News Ltd news sites. Murdoch argues he has paid for the journalism and should get the rewards. “Parasites” like Google should not be able to hang its fee-paying advertisements off content he created at great cost.
Incidentally, Murdoch probably did not realise what an exceptionally good pun in made in referring to Google as a parasite. One of the Greek meanings of the affix “para” is “contrary”. So Google, according to Murdoch, is a contrary site! The trouble for the newspaper companies is that journalism costs a lot. Journalism persuades people to buy newspapers which contain advertisements which persuade people to buy products which persuade advertisers to buy more adverts which provides the money for the journalism, and so on.
Then the internet threatened the cosy, profitable circle.
New car, jobs and real-estate sites provided free classified advertising with more text and pictures and longevity imagined in the world of print.
Sure the newspapers use the internet and put their news online and attract a fair amount of advertising – but nothing like the revenue from advertisements and cover prices of pre-internet days.
Still the newspapers have held up well. Many people preferred paper and the advertisements continue to work – about $4 billion worth last year. Total internet advertising is about $1 billion a year.
Then the para-sites – the search engines – landed another punch. Instead of people going to the homepage of the newspaper sites for a general browse of news and advertisements, the search engines direct people to just items of specific interest and not to the newspaper’s website in general. So people do not see and hit the newspaper websites advertisements as much. Worse, the search engines have the temerity to put their own paid adverts (usually links to other sites) of their results pages.
So Murdoch and others do all the costly work and Google gets the revenue.
That is the rock.
Now for the hard place.
News Ltd is proposing to disable the Google indexer from its sites so that no News Ltd webpages will come up whenever anyone does a Google search. Instead it will do a deal with Microsoft which has a search engine called Bing.
But as much a 30 percent of traffic to newspaper web pages comes from Google. This helps the advertisements on the news pages work. So it is of at least some benefit.
If News Ltd pages do not come up when people do a Google search my guess is that most searchers will not care less. They certainly will not head to Bing just so they can get News Ltd pages in their search results.
The Microsoft modus operandi is to come in late on ideas (spreadsheets, operating systems, internet browsers and now search engines) and then eliminate competition by all sorts of means. Maybe it will not work this time. Google is so well-entrenched.
It will be terrific if Murdoch goes ahead. It might loosen the stranglehold the company has had since 1987 on news and its political influence in Australia. News Ltd has a monopoly morning newspaper in four of eight capitals and a presence in two others.
But with the growth of online audiences, we are seeing a change. Australian newspapers hitherto have been very geographically based rather than politically or socially based, as in Britain. Distances and early technology made it impossible for an Australian newspaper to appeal across the whole country to a particular political or socio-economic audience across the country. Papers in their own city had to be everything to all people, whereas in Britain The Guardian, for example, could appeal to well-off lefties across the country just as working class Tories across the country would opt for the Daily Mirror.
In Australia readers have been stuck with whomever owns the paper in the city in which they reside, most often, since 1987, that has been News Ltd. The only other choice has been the historically late-coming national paper, again the News Ltd’s Australian.
The Australian and most other News Ltd papers are self-confessed centre-right papers, which really means they are right because most people assessing themselves politically wrongly assume they are more centre than they really are.
With the internet, however, people across Australia need not get the News Ltd paper. They can go online for a choice. We are already seeing the cracks. Fairfax is producing the National Times online – more centre and centre-left national commentary and it is producing online competition to News Ltd in other capitals, such as the Brisbane Times and WA Today.
The battle will be interesting. Already the old News Ltd blow torch has come out. On Wednesday among the top 10 stories from News Ltd’s news.com.au were: “Google Executives face jail over video”; “Google sorry for racist search results”.
In Australia News Ltd has been an effective force for conservative causes and conservative governments and business causes. Hitherto politicians knew its strength.
But change is afoot. News Ltd is also being hit by the ABC which like the BBC is increasingly taking on a newspaper role on line. Its content will always be free and on Google – another reason News Ltd’s absence from Google will not matter much.
The big monopoly news provider is feeling the pinch from some other big players. So it is not surprising that it is turning to another big monopoly – Microsoft – for help.
But it won’t find much joy there. People use only Microsoft software because everyone else does and they feel forced to for compatibility reasons. That does not apply to search engines which sweep across sites from and to all operating systems, web browsers and software.
So Bing may not be News Ltd’s answer. Incidentally, “bing” means a heap or pile. As in, perhaps, “ a heap of …”
CRISPIN HULL
This article was published in The Canberra Times on 28 November 2009