Sam Zell might be new to the newspaper business, but he’s already publicly embraced the “Internet is a parasite on newspapers” meme.

“If all the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content for nothing, what would Google do, and how profitable would Google be?” the Los Angeles Times reported Zell saying to Stanford University class this week. Zell has agreed to takeover Tribune Co., which owns The Times.

Zell’s comment is as ill-informed as outgoing ASNE president Dave Zeeck’s were to his organization last week. I’ve been searching the Web through Google, and reading Google News, for years, and can’t recall Google publishing complete newspaper stories under the Google brand.

Yes, Google hyperlinks page titles and publishes short snippets of those pages’ content beneath them on its search engine result and Google News pages. Those links have helped millions of readers find newspaper stories that they would not have read otherwise.

Without newspaper content on Google News and in Google’s search engine result pages [SERPs], newspapers would face an even more dire future, as those millions of readers would find instead other, non-newspaper sources of news and information. And Google wouldn’t lose much at all. Google News doesn’t run ads. And I suspect that Google’s AdWords program would continue to haul in billions of dollars annually even without newspaper.coms in the SERPs.

Surely, not everyone in the newspaper industry shares Zell’s extreme view. For all the ignorance that certain newspaper managers exhibit in public forums, the newspaper industry employs many more sharp individuals with deep knowledge of how the Web works and how to make money from it. They’re found in the online departments of newspaper.coms and they deserve their chance to call the shots on how newspapers will approach the Internet.

The Zeeck and Zell attitude won’t save newspapers, and will serve only to further isolate them from a new and growing generation of Web-savvy readers.

I e-mailed several newspaper.com managers to ask them what they thought of Zell’s comment, and how they think the newspaper industry ought to approach the search engines.

Chris Jennewein
Vice President, Internet Operations, Union-Tribune Publishing Co.

I think newspapers should welcome search engines because they drive traffic to our sites. Our business on the Internet is all about building audience, and audiences find our sites through search engines. Fighting the new reality of Internet search is ultimately self-defeating for our industry.

Ken Sands
Online publisher, www.SpokesmanReview.com

Well, first reaction is that Zell is talking primarily about Google News, not Google itself. He suggests Google wouldn’t have anything without the content from media, and that’s just not true. Google News aggregates links. It doesn’t steal the content so much as organize it in a way that’s meaningful for lots of people. Mainstream media could have done the same thing but didn’t have the vision, the organizational capabilities or the technical skill.

Google argues that it’s a partner of the MSM, sending readers to each site (for free!). I can’t argue with that. Almost 40 percent of the visitors to our site come through Google searches. Those are typically one-time, one-story readers, but they do account for a huge amount of our traffic. There’s a legitimate question about whether these inflated numbers are meaningful… not sure this does our local advertisers much good.

On balance, I’d say Google does more good than harm. The Google Ad Sense for Newspapers alpha project is a good example. They’ve sent advertising to print newspapers for several months without taking a cut of the action. When the program goes to beta, they will begin taking a small percentage. They seem to understand that their best way of making money is to make sure that everyone else makes money, too.

Will Google some day dominate the media world? Quite possibly. But for now at least, it’s sure hard to pass up their goodies.

Steve Yelvington
Internet strategist, Morris Communications

Sam Zell’s comments make a lot of editors feel good, and editors need something to feel good about these days. But news search and aggregation are just a piddling part of Google’s portfolio of services. Google doesn’t even run advertising in its news channel, so claiming that newspaper content is behind Google’s profitability is just saber-rattling.

Google is a significant threat, but not because it’s “stealing” newspaper content. They’re rolling up a lot of local small business money that newspapers can and should be chasing. We’re not going to get that business by sitting around in our newspaper offices and wishing for the return of sideburns and bell-bottom trousers. We need to be out creating new solutions and coming up with better ideas.

I’ll post additional comments as they hit my in-box. Or you can post your thoughts through the comment button below.