Make Google Share! Uh, Whatever...

An amazing little piece by publisher Peter Osnos calls news organizations to task for letting Google News pick up their stories without giving them a cut of the profits. The problem here is that Osnos somehow didn't check to see how Google News actually works. It links to stories on the publishers' own sites, from which news organizations do get a cut of the profits--100 percent. And it has no ads of its own.

The dispiriting wisdom these days seems to be that online news still hasn't found a business model that works and will support the kind of journalism we want. This is true, but for most news organizations, the problem goes beyond the business model. It's the product. The complaint about the lack of business models seems most prevalent in the world of magazines, and especially newspapers, which mostly put out a product leached of a style or interest and produced in conditions no sane person would work in (the same could probably be said of the nightly network news, but really I don't know enough to judge). For years the news has relied on the idea that people would read the paper or watch the evening news because they had to. This idea is being demolished more fully each day, and no new business model will fix that.