So, why are they selling? It turned out that buying the LA Taimes was a poisoned chalice. The insane Chandler Family ended up as the biggest shareholders, and they complained that they weren’t getting 25% profit. So they demanded the paper go on sale at the bottom of the market, when nobody knows exactly what is going to happen. Sam Zell made his fortune buying good assets from hysterics who were eager to cash out, then holding on to them until their true worth reappeared. Although the bolosphere is eager to see the print media be destroyed (except maybe for comic books), Zell is very canny, indeed. Let’s look back five years hence and see who is still in business.

Uh, wrong, wrong, wrong.
And you present yourself as some kind of expert, or something?

On the first point, Google scores poorly. It isn’t taking the content to use in a report it’s written. It isn’t commenting on a report. It’s just taking the report and repackaging it under its own brand.

On the second point, Google also scores poorly, but much less blatantly. Many folks have claimed Google does not benefit financially from Google News. But they’re just not looking carefully enough.

Assume for a moment that all multi-billion dollar companies are in every project ultimately for the money, including Google. So how does Google make money off its Google News service, which doesn’t have any ads? It benefits in two ways:

• By indexing and displaying newspaper content on its Web site, Google’s brand benefits significantly as a place to find any kind of information. That brand reputation is making them a hell of a lot of money by driving loyal customers. Google converts that loyalty into money in numerous ways, across its entire site. Not having ads on one section of the site doesn’t excuse it from benefiting.

• By driving up links to newspaper Web sites, loads of remnant inventory is created on those sites. Since local advertisers have no interest in these one-off page views, the remnant space is most often filled with Google AdSense ads. This isn’t coincidence. Google understands the effect of driving up remnant inventory via Google News.

All multi-billion dollar companies are in it for the money, Google included. They’re not featuring Google News prominently on their ever-so-sparse home page just to be nice.

I have read your post, and I don’t see any support for your assertion that indexing each headline and link is any violation. Fair use allows for news reporting and places no hard limits on a specific number of words. It seems to me that Google is well within its rights, and what’s more, doing the Tribune a service.

You also write: “Page views generated from search engine traffic are empty. Advertisers have no interest in them. And people accessing us this way are unlikely to become repeat users.”

For one thing, readers who come to visit a website because they were looking for a particular term are indeed valuable — the more specific the search term, the better targeted they are.

I understand your point about how newspapers want to be their own local hub, but these readers are very often not local. Newspapers online can offer different ads to local readers and non-local visitors.

And the non-locals may never have found a given regional newspaper article but for Google News.

Explaining why fair use doesn’t apply is outlined there, as well.