Too Big for Their Britches

The portion of the New Yorker article on Google that was most interesting to me was the discussion of Google’s pirating of content. Newspapers (an industry that I hope to work in) are dying off because they can no longer figure out how to get money for their content due to a massive increase in internet readership. Since they cannot charge for content over the internet and remain competitive most publications have seen drastic reductions in revenue and are finding it hard to stay afloat. This has led to the early retirement of many talented and experienced writers and thus the quality of reporting has been compromised.

As Ken Aluetta writes, “as Google moves beyond search, it has antagonized just about every traditional media at one time or another. “ I think that antagonize is to light of a word. In reality they are stealing content and thus ad revenue. Google puts stories written by reporters paid by other organizations up and then collects ad revenue on their page without paying these organizations. They get away with this because they are in unchartered territory. There are no laws against posting a link to a news article and so Google is breaking no laws by stealing content.

While this is working for Google and others (yahoo) now it will not last forever. As publications continue to lose money they will no longer be able to pay reporters and so reporting will be left to citizen journalists and conglomerate news corporations with many political and financial ties. While Google is innovative they need to watch whose toes they step on. New technology is always followed by new legislation and this will be no different. Some sort of ownership must be recognized for internet content or the quality of reporting in this country, and across the globe will continue to decline.