#WANIndia2009: Google must engage more with publishers, says senior VP

Google will make more effort to work with newspaper publishers, but is not the cause of the industry’s current problems, David Drummond, senior vice president and chief legal counsel of Google USA, said today.

Speaking at the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference in a debate entitled 'What do we do about Google', Drummond said the search company had not gone far enough in engaging publishers and should also share expertise, such as its online advertising knowledge.

"If Google didn't exist would the industry be in a better position than it is?" he asked.

"Google is a willing partner to finding solutions as hard as that task is (…) Google offers a source of promotion [for newspapers] that was undreamed of several years ago."

Qualifying this, Drummond said Google serves 16 billion click-throughs a month to publishers via Google news and 36 billion a month through general web search: "And we don't charge anything for that (…) The suggestion that we are making big profits off the backs of newspapers isn't true."

This week the search giant has launched two products with publishers in mind, in particular those that are considering charging for content, he said.

Announced today, Google has launched a separate crawler for Google News. As such publishers will be able to control how their content appears in Google News and can have it presented differently in a general web search.

The second is a development of its First Click Free system, to help publishers who want their content indexed by the search engine, but have pay walls or subscription charges in place.

Google will also soon announce new international publishing partners in its Fast Flip project, a new way of presenting newspapers and magazines online in which publishers receive the majority share of revenue.

Small and large publishers are already testing the service, which was launched in September, said Drummond.

He stressed that publishers will need to experiment with a mixture of technologies and potential solutions: "Ultimately it is the publisher who will decide (…) There's no single cause of the industries problems and there’s no single solution."

Drummond's comments followed a spate of name-calling against search engines and aggregators in recent months, in particular Rupert Murdoch's speech to the Beijing Media Summit.

Addressing the WAN conference earlier this week, Murdoch's lieutenant Les Hinton, CEO of Dow Jones, gave a more conciliatory speech, admitting that newspapers themselves must take responsibility for the role they have played in the crises facing the industry.

But WAN-IFRA president and CEO of Independent News and Media Gavin O’Reilly said the newspaper industry was 'not a charity case': "Our [WAN’s] publishers don’t need handouts or crumbs from Google's table."

Drummond said Google was not interested in handouts, but would instead seek mutually beneficial, commercial partnerships with publishers through services.

Copyright
Google must be clearer about how it carries out its indexing and adhere to copyright regulations surrounding publisher's content, O'Reilly added.

"Not saying no [to Google's indexing], doesn't mean saying yes. Bots should not presume automatically that our content is their content."

"Surely our publishers have the right to be able to decide how our content is exploited by them [search engines and aggregators]."

Newspapers need to make better use of available technologies to ensure their content is protected online, he added, suggesting that by not participating in ACAP, the Automated Content Access Protocol established as an alternative to the robots.txt protocol and supported by WAN, Google has a problem with copyright.

But Drummond said the search company adhered to copyright and fair use legislation and only shows snippets, headlines and a couple of lines of content within its results. Its use of content has only been contested in one court, the ongoing case of Copiepresse in Belgium, he added.

Google has not made its mind up about ACAP yet as it wants to find a solution that works for all industries and not one designed with a specific industry in mind, he said.

All coverage of #WANIndia2009 from Journalism.co.uk can be found at this link.

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