You have to admire their imagery.
In April, the managing director of the Wall Street Journal Robert Thomson called news aggregators like Google, Yahoo, etc., promiscuous tech tapeworms.
At the World Media Summit in Beijing, Rupert Murdoch, owner of the world's second largest media company News Corporation ,which includes newspapers such as the Sun and the Times in the UK, The Australian and The Daily Telegraph in Australia and the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in the US, along with over twenty magazines, and various radio and TV investments such as Fox Broadcasting in the US (see here for all the various holdings), called aggregators "content kleptomaniacs" and "plagiarists," among other things, according to the BBC.
Quoting from the BBC article:
"The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. ... If we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators - the people in this hall - who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph."
Associated Press chief executive Tom Curley supported Mr. Murdoch's call for the paying for news content and said that "content creators must act quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content"
An AP story quotes Mr. Curley as saying that,
"Crowd-sourcing web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook, have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing web sites of traditional news publishers.... We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves - at great human and economic cost - to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it."
It will be interesting to see whether Google and others will be willing to pay for content, or whether they will instead be inspired to become news gathering organizations themselves, and aim to put AP, News Corp and the others out of business.
Robert N. Charette is a Contributing Editor to IEEE Spectrum and an acknowledged international authority on information technology and systems risk management. A self-described “risk ecologist,” he is interested in the intersections of business, political, technological, and societal risks. Charette is an award-winning author of multiple books and numerous articles on the subjects of risk management, project and program management, innovation, and entrepreneurship. A Life Senior Member of the IEEE, Charette was a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core Award in 2008.
