Swimming with the clown fish

Here’s an interesting story from the New York Times that highlights exactly why we in the newspaper business have missed the boat when it comes to online content. It’s not really our fault, though. We’re still operating from a mindset that content is king, and that the most important part of our business is creating new content, beating our competitors to the punch in releasing that content and then making sure it’s exclusive to us. Forever.

It’s a strategy that works in the analog world to be sure; but we’ve missed something very important in the world of online content management. It’s less important who created the content than it is who makes it easiest to consume.

“Neither Mr. Singleton nor a statement released by [The Associated Press] mentioned any adversary by name. But many news executives, including some at The AP, have voiced concern that their work has become a source of revenue for Google and other sites that can sell search terms or ads on pages that turn up articles.”

The game has changed because companies like Google make it easy to find great content online. And, in a lot of cases, Google has monetized the content better than the content creator. By perfecting search technology and then selling ads and sponsored listings on results pages, Google is capitalizing on content without creating any significant new content on its own.

Sites like Digg and Reddit have a similar game plan for monetizing content they didn’t create – and those companies are upping the ante by adding social features the originating sites can’t duplicate.

“News aggregators and search companies have long asserted that collecting snippets of articles — usually headlines and a sentence or two — is allowed under the legal doctrine of ‘fair use.’ News organizations have been reluctant to test that idea in court, and it is still not clear whether The AP is willing to test the fair use doctrine.
 
“‘This is not about defining fair use,’ said Sue A. Cross, a senior vice president of the group, who added several times during an interview that news organizations want to work with the aggregators, not against them. ‘There’s a bigger economic issue at stake here that we’re trying to tackle.’”

Well, the stark reality is this: the “bigger economic issue” that faces The Associated Press and most content creators is that we can’t survive without the aggregators and search engines. Yeah, these other sites are selling ads on pages full of links to our content, but, that’s life. Great content no one can find is practically useless.

What we have to do is ditch the idea that, because we create content, we’re entitled to profit from it. We still have to earn our money, even after we’ve created the content the public seems to be clammering for all over the Internet. We earn it by getting people to stay on our site once they get there via Digg or Google, and by giving them a reason to become invested in what we do because we give them a great user experience and a very high signal to noise ratio.

Just like we did wit h the old-fashioned morning and afternoon dead-tree editions, we have to build up trust in our digital product. That’s what will get people coming our way over and over again, maybe even without the help of a middle-feeder search engine or bottom-feeder aggregator.

The good news is we do create the content. And we have the power to present great content in an engaging way to our visitors. If we get that right, the search engines and aggregators become allies instead of nemeses.