Ali Rahnema, managing director of the World Association of Newspapers, is pitching the OPA on WAN’s initiative to go after Google News and the aggregators. He acknowledges that some comments he has gotten are positive and some are angry that they are just a dead-tree industry trying to protect themselves. I vote with the latter. They don’t get it. Rahnema asks, could Google News exist if this content were not created by those papers?
That is so much the wrong question. The real question is: Will news organizations in the future exist if they are not found on Google and company?
If you want to boycott search and links, then you will die on paper.
: Rich Karlgaard of Forbes asks the OPA audience whether they agree with Rahnema about Google. Very few raise their hands. He asks who disagrees A vast majority of hands go up. Thank goodness for good sense.
: Obnoxious blogger that I am, I get up to challenge the protectionist panel and said that with their attitude, I fear for the future of the industry and of journalism because the distribution of today is about being found in search and links and aggregation and if you are not there you are not found.
Zach Leonard of Timesonline.com said that aggregators are like newsstands and they are a place to be found.
