Google as the news industry’s middle man

In the grand scheme of things, the Internet was supposed to directly connect people -- buyers and sellers, readers and writers, etc. -- and eliminate the middle man. In reality, the middle man is more important than ever, and the biggest middle man of them all is Google, argues Nicholas Carr.

Carr turns this observation onto journalism, saying that Google devalues news content and keeps its creators from making as much money off of it as they can. Google does this, he says, by encouraging a proliferation of news content that makes it harder for all content creators to make money:

When it comes to Google and other aggregators, newspapers face a sort of prisoners' dilemma. If one of them escapes, their competitors will pick up the traffic they lose. But if all of them stay, none of them will ever get enough traffic to make sufficient money. So they all stay in the prison, occasionally yelling insults at their jailer through the bars on the door.

Carr's proposed solution is to change the news business (of course). First of all, stopping the endless spread of repeated and devalued news requires reducing "production capacity -- i.e., the consolidation or disappearance of lots of news outlets." On top of that, the surviving outlets must take steps to create scarcity:

I don't mean preventing bloggers from posting fair-use snippets of articles. I mean curbing the rampant syndication, authorized or not, of full-text articles. Syndication makes sense when articles remain on the paper they were printed on. It doesn't make sense when articles float freely across the global web. (Take note, AP.)

Mathew Ingram, writing at the Nieman Journalism Lab, disagrees with Carr's view of Google. In Ingram's view, Google adds value to news content by making it available to more people than it could ever be available to without Google's help. He disagrees with Carr's belief that the middle man robs power from the supplier.

The broader the control that Google has over the exchanges that take place in a market, the greater its power — but that power doesn’t lessen the power of Google’s suppliers. If anything, in fact, it amplifies it. Does Google indexing my website, and providing a link to it when someone searches for my name, lessen the power that I have over my content? If you think of power as control over who sees the content and where, then yes. But in reality, it provides me with far more reach than I could otherwise achieve on my own, by exposing that content to people.

He also disagrees with what Carr suggests about creating scarcity. It's something that he says the AP is trying to do with its newest FAQ section and new online policies.

Trying to artificially re-create the kind of scarcity that papers used to enjoy — something that was a function of the control they had over a distribution mechanism, more than anything else — is a mug’s game.

I wish Ingram had gone a little deeper into this subject. Trying to artificially add value to your content by manipulating the market to create scarcity is shady business. Shouldn't the news content we produce have its own inherent value simply because of the news it bears? (It should.)

I think Carr and Ingram are on different pages when it comes to the concept of "controlling" your content. Carr's sense of control seems to deal with having the ability to make money off of your own content and to make more money off that content than anybody else (because it's yours, after all). Ingram's definition of "control" seems different, but I don't think there's enough in his post for me to fathom what he means. I hope he writes more about it in future posts.

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3. Google News Archive
4. A New Lawsuit Against Google
5. iTunes not a money maker and wouldn’t be for news