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On Newspapers and Google: What's the Real Problem Here? What Do Readers Want?

By Pamela Jones et al.

Here's what I've been waiting for before diving into the AP/Newspapers versus Google discussion with my point of view, a complete transcript of Google CEO Eric Schmidt's Q&A at the Newspaper Association of America convention. Thank you very much, Poynter Institute. The audio is available, which I first learned about from Todd Bishop on TechFlash. I didn't find the link in a newspaper, online or off, and I tried. I found it on TechFlash, a blog connected with the Puget Sound Business Journal, doing a little innovation on the journalism model.

That is a symptom of one problem traditional newspapers face, that sometimes they aren't as informative as they could be. They don't grok the Internet even when they go online, or understand what we want when we are searching for information online. But that's not the core problem.

There are trust issues too, but they tie into the main problem I see, which is that news content has never been what primarily funded newspapers, and it *should* never be. It was the ads and the listings that funded print newspapers, and they flew the coop and landed on Craigslist. That loss of a revenue stream is the principal problem, and newspapers have to find some replacement. Charging for news articles or even ads on news articles won't do it online any more than it did in print. They have to offer something people want, something they'll pay for, something that will be as remunerative as the listings that went to Craigslist were.

They have to sell something besides news that people will pay for that will fund the journalism. There. I said it.

Full post as published by Groklaw on April 08, 2009 (boomark / email).