Is Google killing off the newspapers?

William Echikson is Google’s Senior Manager for Communications based in Brussels. He is a veteran European correspondent, writing over the past two and a half decades for a series of international publications including the Christian Science Monitor, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and BusinessWeek. From 2001 until 2007, he managed the Brussels bureau for Dow Jones as bureau chief. He also has written, directed and produced for television documentaries for America’s Public Broadcasting Service and published three books. His fourth on golf, Shooting For Tiger, is coming out in May.

What is causing the slowdown of the print media industry?

This is a question that the industry could best answer, as it’s not just a question about the growth of online news. Remember, newspapers don’t have a problem of demand for their product, the news. People love the news. They love reading, discussing it, adding to it, annotating it. The Internet has made the news more accessible. There’s a problem with advertising, classifieds and the cost itself of a newspaper: physical printing, delivery and so on. And so the business model gets squeezed. is clear to everyone is that online content only continues to grow, and no one has yet found the silver bullet for monetising it. There are a lot of experiments with open and premium content.

How would you describe Google’s current role in the news industry?

We are a platform, not a media company. We don’t produce content. We help others express themselves. We help users find newspapers and news sources that they hadn’t experienced before. Consider Google News. It enables users to easily access a variety of perspectives on up-to- the-minute news by linking to stories from thousands of news outlets around the world. Instead of reading just one article, Google News users are encouraged to read several, and sea rch for more on any subject they might be interested in. To read the entire story, users can click on the headline and they are taken directly to the news publisher’s website. By collating articles from numerous different sources in one place, Google makes the news more accessible and more interesting – encouraging people to read more and so benefiting the news industry as a whole.

Critics suggest that “Google is killing the newspaper.” What are your thoughts?

Again, it is the Internet, not Google, that is forcing a fundamental change in the newspaper business model. Google’s focus isn’t to create content; rather, it’s to get users to the news they are looking for. We don’t display the stories in their entirety. We simply show the headlines, a line or two of text, and links to the site – just enough information to make the user want to read the full story. Once a user clicks through to the article, it’s up to the news publisher to decide how to profit from this free traffic, which is the lifeblood of online content. The news outlet can choose to charge people to read the story, or it can show advertising on its site. If a site owner wishes to use Google’s ads then we give the owner the majority of that revenue. Many online publishers have thrived with Google’s advertising support. Last year, we generated more than UD five billion for our partners. That’s a lot of money.

The fundamental question, according to Google’s CEO, is why Google does not write large checks to newspapers. So, why not?

Our CEO Eric Schmidt answered this himself. He doesn’t think our purchasing a newspaper would solve the business problems. It would help solidify the ownership structure, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem in the business. Until we can answer that question we’re in this uncomfortable conversation.

Eric Schmidt also claimed that Google is to some extent capable of helping the newspaper to solve its problems. Besides the “large check” solution, how can Google help?

Remember, we give newspapers partners some USD five billion a year in sharing advertising fees. What our CEO said, and let me quote is, “It’s not obvious what the grand gesture would be. Google can’t make the cost of newsprint go down. We also can’t materially change the way consumers behave, and consumers are in fact moving their lives online. We have been able to send clicks to their Web sites, which they can monetise. So that provides some revenue. The problem is that doesn’t provide enough revenue to offset the loss of the other revenue.”

Could Google enter the media market by buying shares in struggling media, or programs to assist traditional media in breaking the technological barriers of online.

We are doing a lot. Google helps news publishers take advantage of the huge opportunities the Internet offers. Users discover new editorial voices and try out news publisher sites they may never have discovered otherwise. Google drives significant traffic and new readers to news publisher sites. And it attracts readers searching from Google web search as well as from the Google News site. We drive the traffic to their sites, then publishers can decide what the next step is. Google also provides a lot of tools to help journalists do research (Google News, Book Search, News Archive Search, Google Trends, and Google Scholar); to help publishers get more visibility through our search services; and to help publishers control what kind of content they do or don’t want indexed (Sitemaps). But we’re always looking for ways to do more, and we’re constantly in dialogue with publishers around the world.