Valley PR Blog

Latest plan to save newspaper industry criticized

By Len Gutman on June 3rd, 2009 In Media

There’s an insightful and fascinating post today on TechCrunch about the American Press Institute’s “secret meeting” last week with newspaper industry leaders aimed at laying out a plan to save the industry from the devils at Google. TechCrunch’s Leena Rao digs into the industry’s white paper, which was secured and posted by Nieman Journalism Lab. You can read the entire white paper online (especially interesting if you’re a media geek like me).

The bottom line of Rao’s post is that along with suggestions for saving the industry, the industry itself is quick to point fingers at Google and other online aggregators for “stealing their content.” It seems to me the media should not be pointing fingers, but rather looking at itself in the mirror and wondering why it missed the content aggregation boat. Not only that, as Rao points out, Google is one of the industry’s best friends because in its search results it more often than not actually sends people to media sites. Rao calls Google a “frenemy” of the industry. Love it. But the best quote in the post comes from author Michael Connelly who  said in an interview that “Google doesn’t kill newspapers. People kill newspapers.”

If you’re in PR it’s imperative these days that you keep up on the ongoing debate about the future of media — your career just might depend on the outcome.

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