Carl,
First of all the Doctor and Dentist offices don't carve up and reformat the newspapers to suit their needs. Second, except for the employees, people aren't going to head over to the Doctor/Dentist office to read this reformated news on a consistent basis.
While it might be inconceivable to someone who relies heavily on search engines for both its traffic and its revenue, newspapers once had, and arguably still do, have a thriving business built on the basis of serving their audience for many decades. Inherent in that thriving business is a syndication concept where owners share content with partners based on some kind of economic reality.
I suppose you've got it all figured out though Mr News 2.0 Guy.
Thanks for taking the time to provide a different point of view.
If newspapers are doing such a great job, why are their readerships -- and in many cases their revenues -- declining? In the latest survey of newspaper readerships, only one of the top 10 newspapers showed a readership increase, and that was the New York Times. The article is on the WSJ here. That's the fundamental puzzle these guys have to figure out.
Yes, they have huge costs of creating content. But they are competing with a lot of similar content that is free. And the advertisers want real-time measurable results of how well their ads are doing, something that can be done online and can't be done offline. So newspapers who lock their content away are in a no-win situation. They need to tap new audiences and readers -- and the only way to do that is through Google or similar networks that get the readers to them.
Even the Wall Street Journal figured this out, and they were succeeding with a subscription business model. The cost of not being part of the online media stream was just too high. So they made their top stories free again to draw in new readers. In short, they used their content to market themselves.
Again, thanks for taking the time and I hope you'll keep reading.
Carl
You may find it hard to believe, but readership is actually up at news-companies when you add printed newspaper and online readership together. Even when it's unduplicated. (Check with Media Audit and Nielsen)
As for newspapers suing Google to stop indexing... WAN does not speak for the US newspaper industry. I have yet to hear of a US news organization or company pursuing such a thing.
Besides, blocking Google's spider is a pretty simple technical trick. Since Google News is chock full of indexed news, I'd say WAN is in the minority.
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