This article was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 22nd July 2010 15.50 UTC
The future of US online news could be stifled by proposals put forward by the Federal Trade Commission to protect journalism, Google has warned.
In its 20-page response to the FTC’s discussion draft, the search giant argues that the proposals, far from working towards a sustainable future for the future of news and online journalism, “not only hurt free expression, but also the very profession of journalism”.
“Innovating to create products and services that consumers want to pay for is the only way to guarantee long-term subscription revenue growth, and none of the policy proposals are designed to foster that kind of innovation,” it says.
The FTC began examining the impact of the internet on journalism in May 2009, hosting discussions with publishing executives, professors and internet companies. It issued its 47-page draft report for discussion a year later. Final recommendations are likely to follow.
Among the suggestions the FTC puts forward is the idea of exemptions to competition laws that would enable news organisations to collectively limit the ability of websites to aggregate their content. These exemptions would also make it easier for multiple publishers to move behind a unified paywall. Google said adopting either notion would be a “significant mistake, as a matter of public policy and as a matter of fairness”.
The FTC also suggests that copyright law could also be expanded to limit the right of aggregators to republish reported facts within a specific time period, a change known as a “hot news” exemption.
The response from Mountain view is: “Facts, hot or cold, cannot be protected by copyright since there is no author of them.”
Google goes on to quote John Temple, former editor, president and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, the US newspaper that fell victim to the challenges of the digital age in February last year, as saying:
“Being a great newspaper isn’t enough in the Internet era. You have to know what business you’re in. We thought we were in the newspaper business. Working on the web, you need to think of now and forever. At a newspaper, people largely think about tomorrow. Thinking about tomorrow isn’t enough any more.
“If newspapers would spend more time trying to understand their customers instead of focused on their own internal issues [...] they’re more likely to be successful. That’s a hard switch for traditional manufacturing operations like newspapers to make.”
A hard switch, maybe, but Google is sanguine as ever, concluding:
“Through all of the initiatives we describe above, and more to come, Google continues to work with publishers to find ways to ensure that journalism survives and thrives on the web. We remain optimistic about the future of journalism: the fourth estate is too crucial a part of a functioning democracy, and the Internet too powerful a medium, for journalism to die in transition to a web-first approach. News organisations have more readers than ever, more sources of information than ever, more ways to report and tell stories than ever, and more potential ways to generate revenue than ever. Journalism will change, but the free market and free society will ensure that it won’t die.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
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