Should we allow Google to scan newspaper archives?

Google has begun digitizing microfilm from some newspapers’ historic archives to make them searchable online, first through Google News and eventually on the papers’ own Web sites.

The service is called “News Archive Search” and its beta version is available here.

“Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written. And it’s our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily. The problem is that most of these newspapers are not available online. We want to change that,” writes Punit Soni, product manager, at Official Google Blog.

According to the New York Times, Google will shoulder the cost of digitizing newspaper archives, much as the company does with its book-scanning project.

Google will seek permission from newspaper publishers before scanning their archives and plans to place place advertisements alongside search results, and share the revenue from those ads with newspapers.

Watch an official demo of the new service by Marissa Mayer:

It is another stage of Google’s love and hate relationship with newspapers. As Andrew Smith of the Dallas Morning News writes:

“It’s nice to know that the company that’s putting us newspapers out of business will at least preserve our memory.”

So should newspapers allow Google to digitize and monetize their archives or should they do it on their own?

Svetlana Gladkova, a blogger, states: “Google Comes Up With a Great Initiative for Historians”. But is great for newspaper publishers too?

Advantages

1. Digitization is expensive, so many publishers would not touch the archives without Google’s help.

Tim Rozgonyi, research editor at The St. Petersburg Times, as quoted by the New York Times, says:

“We wouldn’t be talking about digitization if Google had not entered this arena. We looked into it years back, and it appeared to be exceedingly costly.”

2. Google knows how to make money online, newspaper publishers often do not. Thanks to this partnership they can find a new revenue source.

Stephen Shankland of cnet.com calls it “raising newspaper morgues from the dead. He quotes another Google product manager Adam Smith sharing details of the money split:

“The ‘vast majority’ of the ad revenue goes to the publishers. And other revenue models are possible. There may be pay-per-view in the future, but we don’t have anything to announce now.”

3. Maybe it is a high time for publishers to recognize that on the web a business model based on advertising is better than an old-fashioned model based on subscriptions.

As Colby Atwood, president of Borrell Associates, a media research firm, said in the 2007 New York Times article:

“The business model for advertising revenue, versus subscriber revenue, is so much more attractive. The hybrid model has some potential, but in the long run, the advertising side will dominate.”

Threats

1. Archived content will become a commodity and its value will decline.

Ken Doctor, an analyst with Outsell, a research company, as quoted by the New York Times, explains:

“Google, in making all of the past newspaper content available, can greatly commoditize that content, just like news portals have commoditized current news content.”

2. Making archives of some newspapers available for free will kill the business of other newspapers who try to monetize their archives with pay-per-view or subscription models.

Kevin Maney of the Portfolio magazine gives an example:

“For instance, I thought I’d check out archived stories about Gary Hart’s legendary affair with Donna Rice. I could find the story as it appeared in The New York Times — but just the story, not that day’s newspaper. If I tried to pull up that same story from the Dallas Morning News or Philadelphia Inquirer, I just got an abstract with a notice that I had to pay to see the article.

Contrast that with a search for ‘Nixon resigns,’ and a click on the link to The Evening Independent of St. Petersburg, Fla. Now I have scanned images of the whole paper — which is what seems the most useful. And it’s free. Which of course makes it useful to students or others who don’t want to pay $4 every time they look at an old story.”

3. Google is working hard to take traditional newspapers’ role as intermediaries between advertisers and clients. Why should publishers allow Google to control most of their sources of online revenues?

Marissa Mayer of Google says that their archive search service helps to show news articles “in their original context.”

As Rex Hammock comments on his blog:

Let’s be honest. The only reason Google is doing this is to shovel a vast inventory of archival content online on which to run Google ads. The notion that Google is about preserving the “context” of content is, at best, ironic, at worst, cynical spin. Google is an advertising search company, not a context preservation company.

Join the debate

What do you think about the recent initiative of Google? What should newspapers do?

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