Give and take for news publishers
Jinfo Blog

21st July 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

Some mixed messages seem to have been coming from news providers of late. On the one hand, newspaper publishers have been calling on the European Commission to protect them from the aggregators – while on the other, the Associated Press and the Media Standards Trust are proposing new standards to make news stories even easier for Google and the rest to find and index. MST’s proposal is for a news ‘microformat’, encapsulating content and metadata to ensure that critical information is available about every news story. Non-proprietary, open source and intended to become a standard to be used by anyone producing news content, it is already being piloted by openDemocracy.net, the open source news analysis and commentary website (http://digbig.com/5babxk). ‘Traditional news outlets have complained that search portals like Google are too indiscriminate in their displayed results, leaving established news brands lost in the din of press releases, advertising and outdated material,’ comments the San Francisco Chronicle. ‘As a result, traditional media sites are getting less traffic and less advertising revenue, which many companies sorely need as the recession accelerates the decline of print revenues’ (http://digbig.com/5babxp). Meanwhile, though, the European Publishers’ Council and the World Association of Newspapers have presented to European Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding and Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy a declaration calling for further protection of their intellectual property rights. ‘The Internet offers immense opportunities to professional journalism – but only if the basis for profitability remains secure throughout the digital channels of distribution,’ says the Hamburg Declaration (http://digbig.com/5babxq). ‘Universal access to websites does not necessarily mean access at no cost,’ it continues. ‘We no longer wish to be forced to give away property without having granted permission.’ Unimpressed by the Declaration, Google’s response seems to be one of calling the publishers’ bluff. It’s perfectly easy for webmasters to tell Google not to crawl their pages if they don’t want them to, says Josh Cohen, senior business product manager, writing in Google’s European public policy blog; all it takes is a few lines of code, using a technical standard called the Robots Exclusion Protocol, which all the major search engines honour (http://digbig.com/5babxj). As Penny Crossland reported on LiveWire recently, some major newspapers are already going down the paid content route and more if not most are likely to follow (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e22056). But while a subscription to the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal may be unavoidable – even desirable – is a ‘din of press releases’ so big a problem, especially if they increasingly embrace MST’s news microformat?

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