Media Industry to Google: We Want a Bailout

Whoever's at fault this week for the dismal economic state of print media -- be it Arianna Huffington, Craig Newmark or someone else -- publishers increasingly think they know who ought to fix it: Google, of course.

Ad Age reports that the companies on Google's Publishers Advisory Council -- a fraternity that includes The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Inc. and Hearst, among others -- are aggressively making the case that their content ought to be more prominently displayed in search results. Under the current system, complains one unnamed agent of a legacy media institution, "those who are essentially parasites off the true producers of content" -- ie. blogs like this one -- "benefit disproportionately" by appearing higher in Google rankings than the newspapers and magazines whose stories they parasitize.

It's unclear exactly what the publishers are asking of Google, whether they want its search algorithm adjusted so that "original" content is somehow weighted more heavily than blogged content, or whether they simply want some visual indicator that a link leads to a "trusted" news provider. Either concession, but especially the first, would run counter to Google's foundational philosophy. Isn't the idea that it ought to be the masses, not the elite few, who decide whether a news source is "trusted"? And how, exactly, is Google supposed to differentiate between original and repurposed? What about the many, many blogs, including this one, that mix the two, often within the same post?

At any rate, as another anonymous Ad Age source points out, publishers must to some degree blame themselves for their own poor search rankings. After all, a cornerstone of the brief against Huffington is the way her site's links somehow always manage to appear in Google above the stories they summarize.

But however imperfect, the idea of pressuring Google into showing publishers some mercy is gaining currency. In its annual State of the News Media report, the Project for Excellence in Journalism recently called a revenue-sharing deal with Google "a more promising option" than other notional lifelines, such as micropayments from consumers. (Google opened the door to this conversation recently by introducing ads to Google News.)

If Google does end up making some concessions to publishers, and it probably will, it will have less to do with considerations of fairness than with self-interest. Google has no interest in seeing legacy media institutions perish, and it has a marked interest in not finding out what kind of desperate legal remedies a dying industry might resort to in its death throes.