Rupert Murdoch is enough of a newsman to know this: if you start a public row, you might as well cash in on it in your own publications.
Today’s Wall Street Journal gives Eric Schmidt the space to defend himself against some of the accusations that Murdoch and his underlings have been hurling at Google recently.
Schmidt’s response is very much on-message: It’s the Web, not Google, that’s disrupting the news business; Google News is sending a billion clicks a month to the publishers and not charging a cent for the service (how generous); etc.
The trouble is, as Schmidt himself tacitly concedes, it’s very hard to make serious news pay in a world where readers will cherry-pick what they read, story by story. From his Journal opinion piece: “A typical news search – for Afghanistan, say – may generate few if any ads.” Instead, he suggests, subscriptions are probably the best way to support content with “a niche readership”.
“Niche” is not a word calculated to appeal to most existing news organisations, built as they are on a mass-media model. Also, the implication that news about Afghanistan will eventually be consumed only by a niche audience is unsettling.
But as Schmidt rightly says, blaming it on Google won’t make the problem go away.
