Why shouldn’t the Sentinel’s sales staff be able to sell into Morris’s websites for visitors from the Orlando area? And why shouldn’t Morris sales reps be able to sell into the Sentinel’s website for visitors from Morris markets?

Et cetera, et cetera, for all other news chains.

I don’t see the value in driving away customers when you could instead build relationships to make money from them.

Yes, driving them away is logistically simpler. But if the newspaper industry does not build an online advertising system to sell advertisers access to local readers browsing out-of-market news websites, I guarantee that Google will. (And is!)

Google News has built the service that New Century Network should have built, could have built, might have built had the owning-managing newspaper partners been able to get along.

Anybody can easily opt out of search angines. Any newspaper that doesn’t want its content showing up in search engines can “fix” this “problem” by placing a robots.txt file in the htdocs directory containing the following lines:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

That’s your bargaining chip. It’s cheap and easy. Try it and see if Google’s mighty empire comes crashing down.

I don’t think so.

We actually use robots.txt to exclude limited portions of our newspaper websites from the index and search services.

I have no desire to be the unpaid provider of Associated Press content to Google, so several years ago I had our tech guys block spiders from our AP Online feed.

Our advertising-driven business model is based almost entirely on local advertisers, so random visitors from Google News aren’t of any interest to us. And AP content tends to attract random visitors.

But visitors with a specific interest in one of our newspaper markets — Augusta, Jacksonville, Savannah, Lubbock, et cetera — are also interesting to our advertisers. So we do not discourage spidering of our local content.

As newspapers join in an effective advertising network with geotargeting capability — and I’m talking about the various Amigos’ pending deal with Yahoo — the economic equation is going to shift.

Random pageviews will become valuable. Not as valuable as local pageviews, but valuable enough to merit unblocking even the wire content.

Subscription models have, at best, a mixed record on the Web. The Wall Street Journal and New York Times have achieved some financial success with theirs (though outside critics continue to insist that such success has come at a greater opportunity cost of lost readership and ad revenue.) But the L.A. Times and the Columbus Dispatch failed wth their attempts, which both abandoned, but not after crippling loss of market share.

I wonder who’s the priority here? Readers or advertisers? Sure, you can cut off delivery channels that deliver readers your current advertisers do not want. But why not instead go after new advertisers who do want the readers these new channels are delivering?

Personally, I don’t see Google as “stealing” our content. It’s not as if they’re retemplating our articles and getting the page views and ad revenue. Instead, they index our stuff and drive a lot of people to our site. Sure, the fact that people use Google News as a starting point makes them a rival as well. I imagine there will be more talks between Google and newspapers in the coming years, but I don’t think having news organizations demonizing Google makes a lot of sense. I feel the same about the other search engines as well; they are indeed competitors, but they also drive a lot of traffic to us…

“Who is going to own your content in the eyes of the reader?”

I don’t think the reader cares. He/she is going to go to the place that’s easiest, fastest and most useful. It’s more a matter of “How do we get readers to embrace what we produce?”

Now, I know most people aren’t RSS power users, but the rise of RSS and the disassociation of content from its container is a process that’s going to continue. As it does, news organizations are going to need their content to act as a publicity tool because the content (be it a headline, a deck, a full story or a package) is the thing that’s going to draw people in from RSS, news aggregators and search engines.

If local brands can one-up Google/Yahoo or make their information more relevant, interesting, entertaining, contextual, etc. the reader will click and stay. If they can’t do that, the reader will go elsewhere. This is why folks in the newsroom need to understand how the Web is different from other forms of media and then execute on those differences. If they don’t, powerhouses like Google and Yahoo are going to swoop in and take advantage of the opportunity.

I also think the content “ownership” concept needs to change. Newspapers, magazines and TV programs are solid containers for content, but the Web disrupts this idea. The content is disconnected and re-sorted and recategorized on the fly by search engines and Web 2.0 applications. It’s a mistake to try to impose the print/TV container model on the Web. It can be certainly be *used* — there’s no harm in having a site and a brand — but the freeform Web model has a lot of momentum and I see little value in fighting it (i.e. clamping down with subscriptions and registrations, limiting RSS, etc.).

Instead of worrying if people are coming to a local news site, the masterminds behind that site should look for ways to localize content from a variety of sources — how can they create a niche aggregator? How can they provide focus and context to all this information? Rather than fear Google/Yahoo and other aggregators, local folks should find ways to absorb the idea into their own localized strengths.

Who is going to own your content in the eyes of the reader? Google users thank Google for the content (provided via links), not you. Don

IMO, Google’s creating more value for newspapers than vice versa. But few newspapers are earning anywhere near the full dollar amount of the value that Google (and other search engines and news aggregators) are creating for them. Stubborn adherance to old geographic and pricing models keep newspapers feeling ripped off by Google, et al, rather than empowered.

One clarification of your post:

Google News does make money from posting the news. It drives up links to newspaper Web sites, creating loads of remnant inventory on those sites. Since local advertisers have no interest in these one-off page views, then Google convinces these sites to use Google ads for filling the remnant space. This isn’t coincidence. Google understands the effect of driving up remnant inventory with Google News.

Google, like any multi-billion dollar company, is in it to make money. They’re not featuring Google News prominently and running it just for kicks.