reading the News

All the News That’s Fit to Scrape

By Greg Cohn, 4-12-05

Things may be evolving quickly in the way journalism is produced -- see Weber's good post this morning about citizen journalism -- but there's also a revolution going on in the way people obtain their news. As an LA Times article (registration may be required) points out, the two biggest internet portals are both diving deeply into the news business, but taking very different approaches.

In keeping with Google's overall model, Google News is a search engine. You choose a topic; they point you out to other sources of published content. What's proprietary here is the search, organization and presentation of data -- which is good. What they have no control over is the actual quality of that data; that's up to the reader to discern.

Yahoo News, on the other hand, actually publishes the content, striking licensing deals of one sort or another with each publisher. Thus, Yahoo owns the page-view and can keep the reader in its environment, where there are of course all sorts of other types of content to interact with. It costs Yahoo money and time to do this, but then again those page views have a lot of value, readers know they are from reliable sources -- and they don't get sued by their content providers.

At the end of the day, though, both are changing the paradigm radically versus traditional sources of news. Cendant, a company in other industries (and of which I am a stockholder), recently noted in an annual report that its travel business was shifting from one of being an "order taker" to one of being an "order maker". In this model, the customer, rather than choosing from what's on offer, decides what he wants and lets the service providers compete to fill it.

I think this is an excellent metaphor for where the news business is going. News isn't what we decide it should be; it's what YOU decide it should be. And, via enterprises like New West, you can help make it.

Old-line business that can't keep up with this are going to get whacked. Loyal New West readers will appreciate my fondness for the quote the LA Times found on the subject:

"The newspaper industry, looking at the Internet, is beginning to feel like it's being nibbled to death by ducks," said Borrell, the consultant. "It continually pecks away at what the local newspaper has been able to provide the local community."

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