It's not journalism
Google's latest effort highlights the difference between what it does and what newspapers and magazines do. — Many publishers consider the Internet, and Google in particular, a greater threat to their livelihoods than Osama bin Laden.
Context & Ripple Effects
This op-ed lands on a friction point that has been building since at least November 2005, when New York Magazine framed the mood among publishers as outright Googlephobia, followed by Business Week's January 2006 examination of legal pressure being put on Google. By May 2007 the dispute had turned transactional, with newspapers demanding that Google News pay for the traffic and revenue it derives from their stories.
What is new here is the argument's framing: the Los Angeles Times concedes Google's power but denies it the 'journalism' label entirely — a rhetorical move aimed at legitimacy rather than money. That the Online Journalism Review picked the piece up the same day, with a headline accusing the Times of telling critics to 'shut up,' shows how contested even the framing itself had become.
First-order effects
- Publishers' grievance shifts from compensation to definition: if Google produces no journalism, its aggregation of headlines and snippets has no editorial claim to deference, giving outlets like the Los Angeles Times a principled basis to demand terms.
- Google faces a reputational fight alongside its commercial one — the piece arrives amid confirmed evidence that its online advertising growth is draining ad dollars away from traditional media outlets.
Second-order effects
- Legal pressure becomes more attractive than negotiation: with about a dozen lawsuits already challenging search engines over trademarked keywords like Mercedes Benz appearing in competitor ads, publishers have a template for forcing Google into court rather than bargaining.
- Other media companies must pick a side publicly — syndication and commentary the same day show the debate polarizing the industry between those who litigate or editorialize against Google and those who keep feeding it content.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the structural question stops being whether aggregators pay and becomes who owns the reader relationship — originators versus intermediaries — a contest that will define news economics for years and could eventually draw regulators or new licensing norms.
- Google's counter-strategy, visible in its steady tooling updates for publishers (the robots.txt analysis improvements announced August 16), points toward co-optation: making itself indispensable to newsrooms even as it is attacked in their editorials.
The trend: News publishers are escalating from grumbling to organized resistance against Google's aggregation model, testing whether editorial legitimacy and legal leverage can extract payment where goodwill never did.