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Sam Zell's New Deal
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1887 Reads
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In a speech at Stanford yesterday, Sam Zell floated the idea that newspapers should seek to restrict Google and other major search engines from indexing their content. His rationale is that, without content—which is owned by the newspapers—the search engines would go out of business. The title of Zell’s speech was “Make me an offer.” Everything it seems, has a price for Zell.
But Zell is new to the journalism game and this might be a position he wants to back away from. If I owned a newspaper, I’d want Google to be my best friend, not my arch enemy.
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Zell should not be seeking to prohibit Google from indexing LA Times content, he should be cutting a deal to give that content a higher profile in Google page ranks. The simple fact is, Google drives traffic and traffic translates into advertising dollars, the lifeblood of the paper. And if you piss off Sergey and Larry, they just might seek to make an example of you.
How hard would it be for Google to set up it’s own Los Angeles bureau, either from scratch or by buying an existing local news organization?
What are the chances that a significant number of people would get their local news from “Google- Los Angeles” rather than clicking on latimes.com? Certainly not everyone would defect, but an already suffering bottom line at the Times would only get worse.
And unlike Zell, the Google guys don’t much care if they turn a profit so they could fund this ground attack for years and never lose a wink of sleep.
Unless Zell is willing and able to create an alliance of just about every major newspaper in the country to fight the search engines by restricting content— an impossible endeavor that, best case scenario, ends in a pyrrhic victory—he should extend an olive branch to the search engines, not a fist.
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| Posted by: Ryan_Knoll on Friday, April 06, 2007 - 08:20 AM
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