Google, That So-Called Enemy of Newspapers, Introduces a New Archive Service That Lets Newspapers Make Money Without Any Referral Fee

Google’s Archive Search produces the same type of search results one is used to from Google, but instead of the news search going back just 30 days or so, the search will now list the archive files of many newspaper and news aggregator sites and can go back as much as 200 years.

Many newspapers sell their archive material so if a Google archive user clicks on an archived Washington Post story and buys that one article then that is $3.95 of new business that the Post probably would not have seen before. Google doesn’t get any share of the archive sale – its business plan is just to draw more and more users to its news site where it has its own search advertising.

So this writer did three archive searches to see how the system works. The first was on American gangster Al Capone, famous for his Chicago shenanigans in the Roaring 20s, the second on Benito Mussolini of Italian Fascist fame during the 1930s and 1940s, and the third on former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

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In all the searches the Google priority algorithm favored the Washington Post and Time Magazine – although Google maintains there is no built-in favoritism -- but if one searched beyond the first page or two of results then other sources came up. And in every case, except for Time Magazine, to access an archived story the user had to pay.

Perhaps the most useful feature is the timeline that eliminates perhaps the most aggravating thing about a Google search -- that items don’t seem to come up in a chronological order. But click on the timeline button and the results show in a chronological order. And a search can be refined to a period of days or even to one specific day.

How old does a story have to be before it is for sale in a newspaper’s archive? One would have thought the cut-off would have been after 30 days but at The Washington Post, for instance, a Margaret Thatcher story that appeared on its web site from 2004 was free of any archive fee, but a story from 1990 – before the Web -- was not. Everything at Time Magazine appeared to be free (with management there desperately looking for new revenues it may wish to reconsider that policy) – and everything at the New York Times appeared to require payment.

There are a smattering of other free sources besides Time such as The Guardian, but most sources seemed to charge anywhere between $2.95 an article (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) to $3.95 (Washington Post) to $4.95 (New York Times).

There’s little wonder, then, that newspaper executives who have cried “foul” at Google in the past on copyright infringement issues now seem to embrace this new opportunity with open arms.

Typical of the gushing: “This is going to be a very good thing for us,” according to Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of NY Times.com.

Jim Gerber, Google’s content partnerships director, explains the new service is “a perfect example of how we can work with content providers to realize their business goals.”

That’s a change from the past. Google still has on its hands a $17.5 million copyright infringement lawsuit filed last year by Agence France Presse (AFP) with the French news agency charging Google with making available AFP stories on its news service without the agency’s permission.

Google has always maintained it did nothing wrong, but a couple of months back it struck a deal with the Associated Press covering payment for AP stories accessed on the Google news service. Lawyers believe that AP deal may help solidify AFP’s lawsuit – that Google is now paying another news agency for being able to display its content.

And it is not just newspapers and magazines jumping in on this Google archive bandwagon. Even the news aggregators – companies such as Factiva, LexisNexis, and HighBeam -- have opened part of their archives to the Google service, walking that fine line between not wanting to disturb their own archive subscription business and at the same time wanting to add additional revenues.

As bloggers have quickly pointed out many US universities and public libraries provide access to the news aggregators for free, so for some users it is a question of now being able to do the research at home and paying for that comfort, or going to the library and getting the information without payment.

Mind you, seeing what newspapers have archived over the years does bring up some interesting legalities. For instance, A Washington Post search on Al Capone displayed a 1929 AP story. And that probably means that other newspapers and magazines over the years have probably archived news agency stories.

Kind of makes one wonder out loud who really owns the copyright to those stories – the newspapers or the news agencies?

Google, That So-Called Enemy of Newspapers, Introduces a New Archive Service That Lets Newspapers Make Money Without Any Referral Fee

Newspapers, besides cutting costs to the bone, are desperate to find new ways of making money And now Google, the world’s largest media company by far, has come along with a scheme to boost newspaper archive sales that both sides see as a win-win proposition.