I'm a little surprised to see the decline of local media being blamed on "the near monopolistic power of Google and Facebook." The main cause is well-known: in a nutshell, online publishing killed print (meaning original content purveyors, not Google).
It's neither company's fault that revenue from print display & want ads has gone the way of the do-do: sites like Craigslist eviscerated classified ads on a global basis, and revenue from display ads similarly declined in tandem with the loss of one-time print subscribers – for newspapers as well as magazines. Both charged nominal subscription fees since the ads were where the money's at – or where it was at, I suppose. Only a tiny handful of publishers, The Times included, successfully/profitably transitioned to paid online subscriptions; on whole, most web users still expect to get their news for "free" (including from local news sites).
Aside from subscriptions and various types of ancillary revenue (e.g. advertorials), online content publishers are otherwise primarily reliant on pay-per-click (PPC) ads – another reason I find the Australian government's actions against Google & Facebook odd. How, exactly, are they "stealing" revenue from local publishers? Aggregating small amounts of content in one location (e.g. Google News or on friends' Facebook feeds) falls within standard "fair use" doctrine, at least under American law, particularly since links to the source pages on publishers' own sites are nearly always included.
8
I don't think it really makes sense to write this article or breach this subject without also bringing up the issues of both sensationalism and lies by omission in which journalism has been susceptible to since its inceptions. One could argue these aspects are inherent to journalism itself but I still think its worth noting that financial incentives are involved and thus an important factor. Journalism is a hugely important element of a free and open society and just because it and it's dissemination can never be perfected doesn't mean the good should be the enemy of the imperfect.
3
I am intrigued by the thought that this insurgency against Facebook and Google coming out of France and Australia could ultimately do something very important for local news and issues. That is, to preserve and protect full and fair independent journalistic coverage of local issues that have become excessively divisive because of they’re handling on Facebook and Google by manipulative Ai algorithms that play to some of our worst inclinations in political argument.
5
These "platforms" would not have been able to destroy the news business if Congress in 1996 hadn't exempted them from the defamation laws that govern all other publishers. And make no mistake, once the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter began exercising any selectivity whatsoever about their content, they abandoned the category of platform and became publishers -- just like newspapers, magazines and broadcasters.
Perhaps the courts (if they're not all bought out like Congress) could provide some clarity. The 1996 law is premised on the notion that these online giants are mere platforms and exert no control over content. Since this is emphatically not the case and since the laws of the land should be applied equally, these entities should be subject to the same legal scrutiny for slanderous, libelous and generally contemptible content that everyone else is.
10
@Pelham Just to clarify a bit: first, you're conflating different elements under the 1996 law in question (Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (or CDA). The law was originally passed after the SEC sued Prodigy, the pre-internet era online service, after stock traders began swapping insider-trading tips in their chat rooms. It would've been unreasonable to expect Prodigy to police all of its thousands of chat rooms in real time, as is also the case for Google's "basic" search results.
Second, you're assuming – I'd argue erroneously – that the likes of Facebook & Twitter would be legally liable for defamatory content assuming the CDA never existed. This suggests an ignorance of American libel law: in order to pursue actionable claims, a plaintiff has to prove "actual malice" on the publisher's part. In a nutshell this is why successful libel / defamation cases in the U.S. are exceedingly rare: proving something is factually wrong is easy. Proving a given item's author published something false out of sheer spite is vastly harder, if only because "spite" is inherently subjective. Proving malice on Twitter's or Facebook's part would be effectively impossible, and for an easy reason: none exists.
Policing malicious or obscene content is much easier said than done, as the ruling overturning every other part of the CDA shows: the Supreme Court did so in a rare unanimous decision. Neither Congress nor the courts have devised a better solution in the 20+ years since then.
2
News organizations can stop, and many do, this today. Platforms like google cannot allow one to read the NYTimes unless the user pays; although they do give 5 articles free a month. So, news organizations are making money on digital copy and, if they choose, prohibit people to share or access articles via log-in proof that they are a subscriber.
3
@Ma
Maybe not. As newspaper publishers have known for probably a couple of centuries or more, most readers require only a headline on most stories. And the few readers who read past the headline seldom read more than two short paragraphs into a story.
So online platforms that carry any headline from any source on a story plus maybe a sentence or two are bleeding away at least 95% of all the readers who might otherwise have gone to the original source.
As I see it, the only solution in the present environment it is for newspapers to go offline completely and copyright all their original content so no one can legally reproduce it online. In short, newspapers need to have command of their medium, and that medium is ink on paper. Once they put their stuff online, they're pretty much dead.
2
'Big Tech Has Crushed the New Business'
Big Tech has crushed everything, immensely enriching the few, you know which few.
Monopoly on every front you can think of, apparently endorsed and encouraged by all the politicians and compliant law-officials.
Disgusting.
4
The difference between Facebook and Google is night and day.
Google has improved much of the world's communication and fact-based news aggregation.
Facebook has provided a platform for Nazis, KKK, Religious zealots and autocrats everywhere. Facebook has de-based our very information sources, much like FOX has done to television. Facebook has cost us elections and has sent many an unstable person off on a tangent of outrage based on lies.
The two platforms are simply not the same in terms of damage to the social fabric and to our collective dialogue.
6
Big Tech has allowed the spread of misinformation, and in my view, leading to many issues such as polarization and the rise of populism because of their algorithms. I am a believer that a functional democracy comes down to the population to being informed, but sadly like the lock down protests is we have many people who are selfish and only want to read to justify their biases even if it's not factual.
Similar to the new Rabbit Hole podcast, it is design to lead people down a hole that only says what they want to hear. No disagreements, no counter points, and only reinforcing those views. What do giants like Facebook say? People should figure out what is fake news. People are sadly too stupid to figure that out.
What does Google do? Reflect your search history on what you should see which doesn't challenge your thought at all if you get trap in this never-ending disinformation cycle. Worthless leadership and accountability from big-tech, and I'm not a huge fan of intervention, but it's time to take this out of touch sector back to earth and get it together.
3
France and Australia are going to be very upset when Alphabet stop showing news from their national publishers, no snippets, nothing! And they do that across all product's.
They will add insult to injury by jacking ad rates for those publishers
1
Twenty years ago I was very concerned about the 'decline' of print news. At the time, it seemed the sensible 'cure' would involve a transfer tax on the ISPs. Now, it seems Google&Facebook have better captured advertising revenue.
Another issue, raised by a PBS segment 15-18 years ago, is that the profitable returns to newspapers, while sizeable, were not large enough to interest the US capital markets.
We can agree that Craigslist, and then other sites, progressively took over the advertising revenue that the newspapers previously relied upon.
We can wag our fingers at the papers, scolding that they ought devise better revenue models. Books and magazines also offer important feedback on the systemic operations of the larger society (and failings).
But, for a score years, the institution of newspapers have been in decline. Some of the online reporting is arguably superior. But if anything, the value of well edited reportage
has proven itself to the larger society.
Society, particularly one which values the magic of 'free' markets, has a pervasive need for feedback.
1
The evidence shows clearly that people generally aren't willing to pay for journalism and never have been. Before the internet, almost everyone paid for a newspaper subscription, which bundled journalism, the weather, classifieds, personal ads, event announcements, etc. People had to pay for journalism if they wanted those other things.
Now classified are on Craigslist, weather is free online, personal ads are on Tinder, event announcements are on Facebook. So the newspaper is now only journalism and not those other things, which is not a compelling product for most people. I subscribe to several new outlets (including the NY Times) and find this disheartening, but it is true.
3
I have several problem with the narrative expressed in the article, first and foremost, it is the reduction of advertising as a funding source, and not the rise of giants like Google and Facebook that have put news media in financial jeopardy. Secondly, Copyright has been stretched to absurd lengths, now lasting generations past the death of the author. As technology intertwines into our life, the existence of items where the functional basics are copyrightable infiltrates every aspect of our life, and with it rent-seeking is by creators increasing across the board. Printer companies lock us in to their brands of ink, Farmers can no longer fix a broken tractor because of copyright protection of their tracor's computers. Patents are filed for broad concepts of how to do a tasks, and then lawsuits are brought against companies who have actually invested in developing the hardware and software to do the task, or even worse against their end users. or hardware. Musicians bring lawsuits claiming their "style" has been infringed upon, rather than their actual compositions. We have protections for "Fair Use" of copyrighted material precisely to prevent rights of authors, from becoming a tool of censorship or abusive monopoly - we should all be very worried about Governments forcing anyone to pay to exercise their right refer someone to a particular work and even more about them forcing them provide it as a service.
1
The U.S. is on its way down as THE leader of “free world.” The EU will gladly step into that vacuum, both culturally and economically. The world will be a better place for it.
3
When the Google Books project many years ago scanned the content of every known book without receiving the prior permissions of authors the company broke United States law. Just the act of scanning the books was a crime. Yes, an actual crime.
Where was the outrage then? The national news media instead did feature stories about the cool machines Google had created to do the massive scanning project.
And then the news media yawned when writers asked for justice and Google's massive army of lawyers used unlimited resources to pummel and intimidate authors and their union.
The predictable result: most authors can no longer make a living. Not that it was ever a hugely profitable business for writers, but today readers have access to your work on Google without paying a cent.
Now it's happened to the mainstream news media, with devastating consequences. If only the Fourth Estate had paid heed to what Google did to authors years ago.
4
@limn
Everything you've said about the Google Books project is false. You can read *some* books, where publishers have given Google permission to show a small preview (Google then links to places you can buy that book, at no cost to publisher or author). You can read books in the public domain (books published prior to 1923) in full. AND, by the way, the courts established that Google's non-consumptive use of these scans (not the content), to create was is essentially a massive catalog index is a fair use.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/fair-use-prevails-as-supreme-court-rejects-google-books-copyright-case/
Authors books are now at least discoverable-- long after publishers put their books out of print-- which they do early and often.
2
The Walter Cronkite Republican is certainly in favor of the platforms paying for the copyrighted material that is posted on their sites. Such material should be cited to enable readers to distinguish news clearly from opinion, as is done in legitimate news sources.
1
At great peril to democracy in the US, there is a collective amnesia about what monopoly is, particularly as it relates to the internet as a source of information. I recommend reading Goliath, by Matt Stoller (2019) for a little history and enlightenment. It makes good sense for the government (representing the people) to require platforms like FB and Google to pay authoritative news sources (not sure I would include Fox here). Moreover, email services should also be levied to pay for the U.S. Postal System. The sooner the better.
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I’m not a big fan of Google or Facebook, but this article should really be listed as an editorial, it is so self-serving and biased. The problems news organizations face go well beyond those two companies. The fact of the matter is their business model doesn’t translate to the internet age at all, and that has been true long before any of the tech companies established the monopolies they have now.
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When I go to Google news, I see no ads and only enough of the article to decide if I want to read it. To read it, I have to click over to the publisher's site.
So, Google doesn't make money from that, and the publisher gets some traffic.
So that doesn't sound like Google stealing to me.
Now the fact that the publishers are losing money is a problem for sure, but a big part of that is that they lost what used to be local monopolies of the sort that the cable TV companies still enjoy in the US. There used to be limited choice of newspaper in any given city, but now every news outlet globally is available anywhere that you can get online.
Making tech companies pay publishers is not going to accomplish what they think it will.
18
Google promotes web content that has a net overall benefit to it - such as a majority of these sites showing advertisements from google ad services.
Secondly, it also wants users to increasingly rely on Google and spend time in its ecosystem of applications. Once google has a large enough base visiting solely and remaining with in its promoted links - independent sites have to allow google sponsored ads or lose out on major net traffic. If they don’t then they are excluded and not linked. Sure there’s probably a minority of sites that don’t have google ads, but those holdouts can be squeezed out slowly year after year.
Having google ads doesn’t pay much per click to the host site. However, because now google runs most of the web traffic, such as in your example of news sites, a tiny share of ad revenue is better than no traffic and no ad revenue.
Defending monopolies in your free time is interesting. Why do it?
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@Michael Wells
No site is forced to host Google ads. Ads Don't drive site traffic the way you claim.
The sites could and should pay Google to promote them. Instead Google provides free exposure of their site to the world AND the ability for the site to earn ad revenue without having to have a larger sales department
2
Good, it’s about time. It is absolutely scary how powerful Google and other tech companies have become. Those of us old enough to remember can harken a time when there were many web browsers and social media sites. Netscape and MySpace to name a few. It is long past time to break up these tech behemoths who have monopolized entire industries by ruthlessness.
10
Google pays news sites like NYTimes by directing traffic to their site, which the Times profits from by selling online advertisements. If the Times doesn't like those terms, then it's free to negotiate a different agreement. Nobody is sticking a gun to their head. If the Times can't negotiate an agreement whereby Google also pays in cash, it's because its product isn't valuable enough.
As Sims said in this article, “The digital platforms need media generally, but not any particular media company." That's true, because the vast majority of news these days is repeated ad nauseam across thousands of different media outlets. (This very article is a good example - I read the same story in a different paper two weeks ago.) If you type "coronavirus deaths 80,000" into Google's search box and select the "news" tab, you get 9.9 million results. Even if only 0.1% of those are actual news articles, that's 9,900 articles telling you the same thing.
If I write the 9,901st article, what's that worth? And who gets to decide what it's worth - Donald Trump and his appointees? Should regulators dictate that somebody pay me for it because they linked to my site? If so, sign me up - I'd be happy to type what everyone else is saying if it legally obliges others to give me money.
10
Google and Facebook are effectively dorm room mentality cyber operations scaled up to trillion dollar enterprises. Reckless and naive despite some idealized good intentions and Napsterish ethic of stealing from content providers, authors and artists. These giants are effectively too big to reign in by mere national governments - even entire continents are no match to these globalized titans hiding behind borders and compliant paid for governments.
4
I don't understand this idea that Google and Facebook are responsible for the decline of local media. All Google and Facebook do are provide advertising, free advertising at that, via links. Those links drive clicks which generate revenue for various disparate sources. It's the purpose of being an aggregator - you collect links and get ad revenue on the way through to the destination, which increases it's own revenue.
Meanwhile, I've watched my local newspaper and local television station bought out by ever-larger corporate conglomerates, slash the local news budgets in the name of "efficiencies", transforming local news coverage into low-grade, B section stuff, while promoting corporate-driven opinion and news from the head-office. And so you end up with fiascos like the Sinclair Broadcasting scandal.
As you, yourselves, wrote about here: https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000005831914/sinclair-worse-than-one-viral-video.html
13
Definitely a move in the right direction. News organizations need to be paid for their work.
Ive started directly subscribing to a second newspaper as well as the Times, and the Economist. If we don't pay news organizations to gather news, we'll just be left with the trolls.
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@Kim from Alaska
So you are in Alaska. Okay so say your local paper has its own web domain and sells ads on it to local business...all good right?
So say they write a smashing story w/ world interest.,.if Google does not index and promote that site for free, how will the world find that story and find those local advertisers that might have unique Products?
Google can change so that news sources have to pay them for that free advertising and just not carry that preview snippet. Problem solved
1
So reporters pressure politicians to use regulations to get tech companies to support reporters.
Nice reputation you've got there senator be a shame if anything happened to it.
This, apparently, is the plan. Even if it works how will you claim any objectivety afterwords? or am I being naive even bringing that word into a discussion of news coverage?
6
@Brian
It's ironic too that it's in Australia where most of this effort started. There, Murdoch has a political lock on "the news". According to Wikipedia, "News Corp Australia has nearly three-quarters of daily metropolitan newspaper circulation and so maintains great influence in Australia." Hmmm....
5
Accountability for 2 of the richest and greediest of global companies- shocking!
4
There are two things missing from this conversation: (1) the effects of the rise of the internet on news media, rather than FB & Google, and (2) the pros/cons of news consumption pre and post internet.
#1
- Internet usage takes off in North America around '93 (https://ourworldindata.org/internet)
- newspaper circulation begins its decline in the early 90's, but ad revenue doesn't fall until '05 or so. (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/01/circulation-and-revenue-fall-for-newspaper-industry/)
- Google founded in '98, FB founded in '04.
The newspaper industry failed to pivot to a successful digital ad strategy. To their credit, I'm not sure they could have. Ad dollars move to the best information indexing service (Google) and the most popular social media service (FB).
#2
Pre-90's news media was not some utopia of information distribution. Important info had to funnel thru gatekeepers. Read about Henry Luce of Time Magazine, the Chandlers & LA Times, the downfall of Edward R Murrow after he took on McCarthy.
There are real downsides to the current status quo also. But imagine if there were no internet during Jan-March 2020 as COVID-19 spread.
7
Does the NYTimes really believe big-tech will pay for content? Ain't gonna happen and in fact all this will do is speed the death spiral of old media.
Why pay for content when they(tech) has the resources and money to create original content?Just curious.
2
Will they, though, create content? What’s their motivation to do that? Are you thinking that there’s a model like Netflix, but for news? The hiring cost for expertise in that is huge. What do you see as Big Tech’s motivation for developing such a thing? They could, yes. But why would they if they don’t have to?
1
@Gina Setser Why not buy the NYTimes and other outlets so they will not need to reinvent the wheel? Money talks and tech has piles of money.
1
Could someone help clarify the problem? Google and Facebook paying news sources to publish their articles? Is this for full features as part of their online sites, eg if google took this article and reproduced it on their site without paying the New York Times for it? Or does this cover other cases as well, such as when people “share” articles on Facebook? Or when google bubbles up news articles related to a search?
In the first case, the impetus of payment is more or less obvious (paying for full features), but couldn’t this lead to certain news companies being favored over others (by the tech companies) and a kind of filtering/biasing of the "free" press?
In the second, I wouldn’t think Facebook and Google have any payment responsibility. For the first sub-case, Facebook’s users are sharing the actual articles (free advertising for the news companies one could say) and in the second sub-case, a process of “relevance” as used by Google when displaying all kinds of products can be argued to inherently reward “good” journalism. Am I missing something?
4
@Coffee Boy
What France and Australia are trying to extort from Google is the snippet that shows in the search results. Claiming copyright and payment.
Reread the article with attention to the section on Spain's attempt to extort them.
1
not surprisingly this article has a pro newspaper tilt. Nothing said
here will revive local journalism. So payments will further enrich fat cats. And this helps the public how?
5
Big Tech's categorical views/on posting for free all the news/has now run afoul/of government howl/and must start with paying their dues.
2
@tim torkildson
Rupert Murdoch and Sinclair are the billionaires demanding that Google pay them... see no, the extortion cannot be made legal
1
Don't worry, I am sure that the NYT has no agenda in pushing this narrative. /s
Personally, I hope that Google pulls another Google News Spain move and shuts down ALL of its news features for a few weeks. Let's see how news organizations around the world like those apples.
3
Legitimate news media clearly differentiate opinion from news. All players in this game should be held to the same standards. Hannity and Ingraham want to spew propaganda? Facebook and google want to monetize fake news? InfoWars and Brietbart want to deliver daily conspiracy theories? Force them to splash “Opinion” across their respective screens for the duration of their message.
5
Dumbfounding that consumers rely on news from Google and Facebook, have they no awareness that free news isn't free is just advertising empty of content, chock full of siphonage of eye-wash personal profiling (aka mind/body/hopes/hates slop) to fatten ravenous ad porkers. Not say paper news doesn't do that too, but paying for news sooths the honest services gland, establishes a basis to raise objections, threaten to unsub, fire off angry or loving letters to the eds, button-hole/label grab publishers at a lecture to inject a martinied piece of mind or a back slap for telling the truth in virtual ink, ie, like this to Ben Smith's boss. No way to hit on Zuckerberg or the Alphabet boys picking pockets.
1
Read this story twice. Still have no clue what the financial issue is or why these platforms can "steal" news from originating sites without payment. This article would have benefited from some examples.
8
@Thomas
Google is an information aggregator. If you click a story in the results you go to the source websites
What Rupert Murdoch and Sinclair Media want to be paid for is the snippet you read before clicking that link
It is greedy mega media that is demanding this extortion from Google
2
@Thomas
What’s so hard to understand? You’ve never clicked on the “News” button at Google? That’s where Google is stealing news to drive traffic to.... wait for it.... Google.
I'm a retired journalist who at one point in my career was responsible for selling news content to online redistribution sites. News has a real value and Google and Facebook ought to be paying the people who work hard to generate that content BIG TIME for it.
6
When history books in 50 years teach students about the downfall of the US, Facebook will play a prominent role. Mitch McConnell, too. Two evil forces with the same self-seeking goal: enrichment at any costs.
7
We’ve been living in a world wide pandemic of bad information spread virally through Facebook and Google for the last few years. They definitely didn’t rush to get a vaccine built.
The news organizations large and small should have banded together a long time ago when they were stronger and the monopolies weaker and demanded more just use of their materials.
Today outside of the NYT and WSJ how many newspapers can even survive what is the model? Facebook and Google might help the industry titans but what about smaller ones that have local coverage?
We also need to figure out how to blow up the echo chambers of information (they exist on the left too). Increasingly no dissent is allowed inside the echo chambers. And Fox is writing what is basically an alternative reality today. This model still seems dangerous and doesn’t seem to adequately address the ills we are suffering from.
1
Google lists the clientele for the polling institute, which suggests that most of them are Democrats or Democrat-leaning entities. That may or may not call into question the objectivity of the poll.
3
While I hope that reputable journalism gets its just reward, I wonder how this is really going to work, and what the unintended consequences might be. If Google and Facebook have to pay for reputable news, but don't have to pay for fake news, are we going to be seeing even more fake news? I hope not.
22
@Dan Frazier Unfortunately, these days, so-called "reputable" news, at least in the US, is also fake news. The only differences among the various outlets is whether they spin and lie to advance the interests of the right or of the left.
3
@a.p.b. Sorry, but you are just WRONG, a.p.b. There are plenty of news outlets in the US that report the news in an honest, fair and comprehensive manner without spin. My guess is that that you regard news you don't like as "spin." Whatever your political orientation, that's a dangerous way to view the world around you. It's not that difficult to fact check most news stories and determine which outlets are reliable and which are not.
14
@a.p.b.There is a profound difference between "reputable" news and fake news.
Fake news occurs when an organization knowingly publishes something it knows is not true. "Reputable" newspapers do not do this. In fact, they employ editors paid to prevent that from happening. To conjoin the two is misleading and ultimately destructive, as, eventually, people don't know what to believe. Of course, all publications have a certain bent. That is different than knowingly spreading lies.
13
No doubt there are problems with monopolistic behavior on the part of Google etc but if what they're doing is driving traffic to the source news sites, and therefore increasing their ad revenue, it's hard to see what the current push will do to help.
16
@JM
The tech giants may be driving a trickle of traffic to the news sites, but they also steal more readers and revenue from the news industry. The result: degraded newsrooms unable to protect the afflicted from the inflictors.
6
@JM The problem is, the tech giants are NOT increasing ad revenue for news sites, but gobbling it up for themselves.
6
I imagine it's very easy for these countries to target US companies. Something tells me they are less keen to target their own domestic tech companies.
8
News Corp? Seriously? Not news. Registered as entertainment in the US. Root of much of our current political evils because of "alternative facts". Fox News is Trump's state media. I don't see how big tech paying News Corp helps us in any way unless they scrupulously vet the articles for FACTS and refuse to pass on misinformation. I don't see them doing that.
19
These are all steps in the right direction, but there is no doubt that Google and Facebook are not "near monopolies" but total monopolies. And this fails to address the very real problem of publishers like Fox News "opinion" "news hosts" Hannity, Carlson, et. al. who have monetized propaganda and political slander to an extraordinary degree. How do they intend to counter that? I swear we wouldn't have even half the problems we have in the world, if we could just hold these kind of people accountable to factual, ethical reporting standards.
32
I say make them pay. I applaud the EU and the direction this is going. Big Tech does not support news. They support their ability to USE what their logarithms an sell more ads. New is NOT proper on a social platform. Neither is it proper on a aggregator site where you have NO IDEA how they arrived at the decision to put up a specific piece of news.
28
@Per Axel only copying the way entertainment radio and TV Have always operated.
Another bellweather of how other democratic nations are finding their way to versions of the Fairness Doctrine, Net Neutrality and anti-oligarchic media regulations that the US pioneered then dismantled in the past 40 years. The US has had a buy-partisan dismantling of regulations, including media, since Reagan.
Our political system has ceded social/political power to un-elected, unaccountable corporate media and will continue to do that.After all, why should the media oligopoly "suffer" from regulation that other industries e.g. Big Oil, Big Pharma, no longer have to abide by./s
35