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.