News Corp to Offer Plaid Stamps!
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Rupert Murdoch said recently that he’s planning to stop Google News from indexing his publications including the Times of London and the Wall Street Journal. Murdoch’s idea is that Google News and the like make it too easy for Internet users to sample news for free rather than paying for it as God and Rupert intended. Mark Cuban, who is very clever but with whom I rarely agree, thinks this is smart on Murdoch’s part, because Twitter is changing the way people find news, effectively disintermediating Google, but not the News Corp. publications, themselves.
It’s funny how Murdoch’s statement made Cuban think of Twitter while it made me think immediately of the A&P.
The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, or A&P, was America’s first national chain of food markets. Hell, it was America’s first self-serve market, first to have store brands, first to advertise nationally, first to have a customer loyalty program (in 1912!), first to publish its own magazine (Womens’ Day, which is still around, though no longer owned by the A&P), and for most of my childhood back in Ohio A&P was the big Kahuna of grocery chains. With $5.4 billion in sales in the mid-1960s, A&P was at least 20 percent bigger than any of its competitors.
But after 105 years of setting the pace for the grocery industry, A&P peaked in the mid-1960s and went into a decline that lasted for at least 15 years and, it can be argued, continues even to this day. A&P, which has had German owners (the Tengelman Group) since the 1970s, is more of a super-regional chain today and doesn’t particularly vie for industry leadership on any measure. What happened in the mid-1960s to hurt A&P was it opted out of being indexed by Google News.
Well not literally, but close enough. A&P management, which back in the mid-60′s was still chosen from the founding Hartford family, decided at that time to abandon shopping centers — retail aggregators as Google is a news aggregator. They reasoned that in most shopping centers the anchor store was an A&P. In their view their supermarket was the main draw for a shopping center and didn’t need any of those other shops or stores to provide traffic. The rest of the shopping center was seen by A&P management as being purely parasitic. The company could get cheaper real estate down the road with a standalone store, which is why today most A&Ps aren’t in shopping centers. It’s also why A&P is a shadow of its former self.
You see the Hartford family (and Rupert Murdoch) were wrong. The flawed assumption at A&P was that shopping centers would somehow do without an anchor supermarket, which they didn’t. By withdrawing from the common location A&P was not only walking away from significant customer traffic, it was in each case simply handing that traffic to a Safeway or a Kroger store. It was a supremely stupid move.
Which brings us back to Rupert Murdoch, who is brilliant in his own right but in this case can’t find his own URL with both hands. If Murdoch abandons Google News, then those hundreds of millions of reader referrals per day will simply go to other publications or maybe even to guys like me. It’s not like Google can’t fill the space.
Murdoch wants readers to pay for news. I’d like folks to be paying for my words, too. But pulling out of Google News isn’t the way for either of us to accomplish that. And Twitter isn’t a factor with enough of the audience (yet? ever?) to make a difference.
Giving Murdoch the benefit of the doubt, then, I’m guessing he simply doesn’t mean what he said. Perhaps he just wanted to sow a little confusion, get some publicity and maybe a concession or two from Google.
It won’t work.
Um, it’s not The Times of London, or The London Times it’s just The Times. UK newspapers do not include city names in their titles – that’s an American convention. You wouldn’t say the Paris Le Monde or the Hong Kong South China Morning Post would you?
In America, it is almost always referred to as The Times of London, or The London Times. That’s to distinguish it from The New York Times, or the Los Angeles Times, or the Moscow Times, for example. In America, with it’s fifty states, and its plethora of newspapers, many of which have similar names, you do need to distinguish between them by including the name of the city where the newspaper is published.
And of course, as you would probably be the first to point out, Americans frequently need to be reminded of which international city publishes which paper. Although even Americans might figure out that Le Monde is perhaps some sort of French newspaper, and Pravda is a Russian paper, other international cities have a far smaller profile in the States, and it is a convenience for readers to include the country or city where the newspaper is published. Simply referring to “The Morning Post” does not immediately provide most Americans with any frame of reference, and leaves them puzzled and wondering if this is a reference to a blog, or a short hand reference to The Saturday Morning Post.
The Times, The Time of London – who cares? It’s irrelevant.
Why not just go with the Masthead?
The Times of London calls itself “The Times”
The New York Times calls itself “The New York Times”
That, as they say, is all.
Maybe Murdoch is just laying the ground for a good deal with Microsoft…
Murdoch is right in that he won’t make much of a profit putting news on the net for free. Bob is right in that most people on the web pick up the news from aggregators and only read what’s free.
The middle ground is for Murdoch to give away yesterday’s news. People can still send out links – they just might have to wait to tomorrow to read them. And who knows – people might like what they read.
Reg – great idea on selling news freshness and giving the older stuff away. They’ll of course still lose traffic – the great majority of people want to read today’s news and if they can’t get it from WSJ they’ll go elsewhere.
Funny how must news websites are the other ay round – giving away the new stuff, but charging for archives materials…
[...] X Cringely considered just that in his blog post a few weeks ago, News Corp to Give Plaid Stamps! Cringely considers the situation from several not-so-obvious angles and concludes that a News Corp [...]
[...] X Cringely considered just that in his blog post a few weeks ago, News Corp to Give Plaid Stamps! Cringely considers the situation from several not-so-obvious angles and concludes that a News Corp [...]
As I recall, Murdock talked about this 1-2 years ago and still nothing has happened.
As Cringely closes with…he “doesn’t mean what he says”. I think it’s a trial balloon he can talk about. If he really wanted to do it he could do it over a weekend by changing his robots.txt so I really believe he’s looking for a better deal with Google.
WSJ is probably the only property that could truly get away with charging and so if he really wants to do this he may use that as the ‘proof’ that it works but never actually pull the trigger with the other sites.
Funny, we used to get the WSJ and I love it. But it cost too much for morning delivery.
Then I worked at a place that got the WSJ every day and, again, I loved it. It has great articles. It’s timely. It seems to have the news, the non-breaking kind, first.
When the “internet” popped up, I found I couldn’t read WSJ there either. I couldn’t even find it in searches. So … I just gave it up.
I suspect I am not abnormal about this one thing.
Looks like Murdoch has now actually found a workable strategy – helped by Microsoft. Microsoft will pay him to exclude his publications from Google and index them on Bing only.
See
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/56446,business,microsoft-deal-would-pay-for-rupert-murdoch-news
Another reason for me to not use Bing
looks like Roopee is pushing on a string
I believe you actually, I believe! Would it become possible that will have your blog translated into Spanish? English is actually my own second language.
Замечательно Пишите почаще, еще непременно зайду почитать что-то новенькое.
Хорошо что удалось отыскать такой замечательный блог, а то последнее время уже начал думать что инет это мусорка сплошная.
Спасибо. Прочитал с интересом, и вообще полезный у Вас блог
мда , можно зделать маленький сборник
Е-мое, верная статья
Аноним толковый чувак
На каком-то сайте я уже встречал похожую статью!
Где-то я уже видел эту тему хотя пофиг