Can someone please explain the logic of Google vs Newspapers?
barry-cotter: Newspapers provide facts and opinion. The facts can't be copyrighted so anyone can repeat them. The opinion and the bias of any particular newspaper are noise not signal from the point of view of increasing the actual information you have. Its the internet killing the newspapers, by unbundling what most customers want; entertainment, celebrity gossip, sports reporting, from what "serious journalists" go into journalism hoping to do, investigative reporting, political reporting, policy analysis, etc. Most people don't give a damn about any of this, but the institution of the newspaper means the advertisers who pay the salaries of everybody on the newspaper get the (large) audience of people who buy the paper for gossip and sport and the (small) one who buy it for policy wonkery, so there's a cross-subsidy. There are also bloggers who are much better than the vast majority of what you'll see in the papers. The average quality is lower, but the sample size is enormously bigger, and the variance is really rather large so the opinion niche is also threatened. And some people will do it excellently for free.So the newspaper business model is dead. Facts can't be copyrighted, opinion is available for free, cross-subsidisation is no longer viable, and across the developed world the newspaper reading population is trending down. There are bright spots, like India, but most 1st world journalists are screwed.So an entire industry is thrashing around with two choices;(a) die (b) Find an alternative business model. As the biggest, most profitable pure play internet company, shaking Google down is a better choice than resigning oneself to death. As such if you're looking for someone to get mad at, someone to negotiate with as if they're the Internet, they're the best bet.