Zell Wants End to Web's Free Ride

Washington Post ^ | April 7, 2007 | By Frank Ahrens and Karl Vick

[DeaconBenjamin2]

It's time for newspapers to stop giving away their stories to popular search engines such as Google, according to Samuel Zell, the real estate magnate whose bid for Tribune Co. was accepted this week.

In conversations before and after a speech Zell delivered Thursday night at Stanford Law School in Palo Alto, Calif., the billionaire said newspapers could not economically sustain the practice of allowing their articles, photos and other content to be used free by other Internet news aggregators.

"If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?" Zell said during the question period after his speech. "Not very."

Newspapers have allowed Google to use their articles in exchange for a small cut of advertising revenue, but search engines also help to distribute their content to wider online audiences. Google and Yahoo have financial arrangements with wire services, such as the Associated Press, to provide news stories and photos. Yesterday, Google settled a copyright-infringement lawsuit with Agence France-Presse, which had alleged that Google posted news summaries, headlines and photos without permission.

[DeaconBenjamin2]

Pay per view?

[RetiredArmy]

Don’t worry about this guy. He is not going to miss any meals. As soon as the sale goes through, he SELLS THE CHICAGO CUBS and breaks the bank. Probably $500-800 million for the Cubs.

[kempo]

A fool and his money are soon parted.

[JerseyHighlander]

This guy is thinking with a brick and mortar real estate developer’s concept of “the customer”. If 40,000 cars pass an intersection a day, build a mall at that intersection.

He depends on existing taxpayer funded infrastructure that is provided, the roads, the utilities, the police, etc, all there to maintain his ability to make money on the mall.

Will take him a few years to realize the publicly funded internet and online consumer sentiment can in an instant turn your series of tubes with 400,000 customers passing by your mall a day, into a barren wasteland in the high Sierras once any barriers to entry are placed in their path.

For a guy who regularly dines with dotbomb ex-CEO’s, he doesn’t seem to have picked up any of their hard learned lessons.

[ReignOfError]

New ownership could be good for the Cubs. I’ve long said that the biggest problem with the Cubs has been complacent owners enabled by overzealous fans — when you sell out every home game, and then every rooftop in the neighborhood, despite not winning a title in 99 years, where is the incentive for a corporate owner to improve the team?

If you sell every seat with a crappy team, it’s not like you could sell more seats with a better one. And expanding the capacity of the Friendly Confines isn’t really likely to fly.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

It's time for newspapers to stop giving away their stories to popular search engines such as Google, according to Samuel Zell

In other words, it's time for newspapers to give up their only access to younger readers and prepare for extinction. Brilliant.

[conservative in nyc]

The Washington Post and LA Times both thought Free Republic was killing their on-line readership.

So they sued.

In the end they lost, but FR quit posting their articles for the most part.

The Washington Post and L.A. Times WON the trial court level, and the case was settled before it ran its course through the 9th Circuit. If Zell goes after Google to stop it from posting excerpts, this website will likely be next on his hit list, especially if he gets a court order claiming excerpting isn't fair use.

[muawiyah]

Once the LA Times is no longer referenced as an historical source on the internet, it will no longer be relevant to history.

[webstersII]

You want to hire those same liberal journalists?

[conservative in nyc]

Once the LA Times is no longer referenced as an historical source on the internet, it will no longer be relevant to history.

Ultimately, Zell and the L.A. Times want money from Google in order to allow Google to use their headlines and lede paragraphs in Google News. That's what this is about. It has little to do with allowing the L.A. Times to be referenced as an historical source on the Internet. And the courts have been increasingly ruling against news aggregators like Google News, both here and abroad (in Belgium, for example). The trend for fair use is not encouraging.

[freekitty]

Could it only mean mo money for Mr. Zell?

[Zhang Fei]

Zell's got the right idea. Newspapers have a monopoly on local news. (Out-of-area papers don't cover routine local news because it's of absolutely no interest to their readers). And local news is why people subscribe to many newspapers. But making the paper's contents available online keeps many locals from subscribing - why buy when you can get it for free? The reality is that newspapers are operating off the delusions of the internet bubble - long after the bursting of the bubble - that internet eyeballs are worth something*. It just goes to show that the newspapermen who mainly staff the executive suite are second-rate businessmen - over-the-hill reporters masquerading as captains of industry. It has taken a pro like Zell to point out what should have been obvious to these people for a while.

* Let me qualify that - internet eyeballs are worth something - to Google. Not being Google, newspapers make more money off paper subscriptions taken out by locals, than they do off internet eyeballs. The least they could do is make their online editions subscription-only, as the Wall Street Journal has done.

[LdSentinal]

This Zell guy may the new conservative icon by destroying the Tribune company.

[MS from the OC]

Your assumption is that “local papers” carry local news. I actually purchased the LA Times for a week to see how much local content it carried. Living in Orange County, that small area of 2.5 million souls, the LA Slimes carried an average of 4 stories a day.

They cannot have a monopoly on local news if they don’t bother to cover it.

I wonder how many papers are the same.

[adorno]

You want to hire those same liberal journalists?

No. I wouldn't hire anybody.

What I said is: But, regarding that last part, with my idea, the reporters would be working for themselves. Every journalist/author/writer/columnist would be on their own. Free-lancers is what they would become if I had something to do with it.

What keeps a lot of journalists working today is their affiliation with newspapers as hired staff. They work for a newspaper or some other news organization. Many of those journalists wouldn't have a job if people had a choice and they didn't have a ready made list of journalists all hired by someone with an agenda, like the NY Times. The NY Times wouldn't be doing the hiring and readers wouldn't have to choose from just liberal writers/columnists/reporters. When most newspapers lean to the left, most readers won't know the other viewpoints and won't be as well informed as when a newspaper or organization is not offering a single agenda.

If readers were given the choice, chances are that they wouldn't be choosing what the NY Times feeds them. As it is, the NY Times and most of the MSM don't really give readers a choice of journalists or journalism. It's like Air America. People could either take them or leave them. People chose to leave them. And people choose conservative talk-shows by a wide margin even though they have a choice to go to liberal radio. I believe that if reporters are divorced from the newspapers and other news organizations, that their audience would dwindle. When given a choice, people don't choose to read or listen to the liberal diatribes..

[Zhang Fei]

Will take him a few years to realize the publicly funded internet and online consumer sentiment can in an instant turn your series of tubes with 400,000 customers passing by your mall a day, into a barren wasteland in the high Sierras once any barriers to entry are placed in their path. For a guy who regularly dines with dotbomb ex-CEO’s, he doesn’t seem to have picked up any of their hard learned lessons.

I think that's probably the first thing he learned from the dotbomb veterans - that internet eyeballs aren't worth anything unless you're Google (or Yahoo, or a couple of dozen other internet aggregators). Every other profitable company has learned not give away free stuff on the internet. Unfortunately, giving out free stuff is what newspapers are doing, hand over fist. Fundamentally, any newspaper that's not got any prospect of becoming Yahoo needs to pull back on this practice.

[Zhang Fei]

Your assumption is that “local papers” carry local news. I actually purchased the LA Times for a week to see how much local content it carried. Living in Orange County, that small area of 2.5 million souls, the LA Slimes carried an average of 4 stories a day. They cannot have a monopoly on local news if they don’t bother to cover it. I wonder how many papers are the same.

I wrote local when I meant local and statewide. You're not going to get too much coverage of Californian initiatives in the New York Times. Because statewide coverage is mostly limited to in-state papers, every paper has a different angle. Which is why people in LA subscribe mostly to LAT and not NYT.

[The Spirit Of Allegiance]

bump

[Zhang Fei]

This Zell guy may the new conservative icon by destroying the Tribune company.

Zell's a Republican, but I doubt he's interested in flogging the Republican cause one way or another through his purchase of the Tribune. It's just another business in which he's risking billions, probably because the people who've been running it are prime examples of the Peter Principle in action - they are reporters who have been promoted beyond their abilities into the executive suite.

[ken21]

the interviews with zell i liked.

the problem with the l.a. times is that it reads like your leftist college professor.

and most people have grown up and don’t want to read that.