Worker Bees Blog

I already shared my own rant about the short-sightedness the traditioanl media has been showing of late. But far be it from me to not share the love with some other fine rants on the same topic:

Erick Schonfeld of Tech Crunch wrote this right-to-the-point post: That Whining Sound You Hear Is The Death Wheeze Of Newspapers.

Favorite excerpt:

The worst part about their whining is that it is completely hypocritical. While newspaper chiefs are complaining in public about Google, their editorial departments are sprouting blogs and their technology departments are using every SEO trick in the book to make sure their articles show up in Google searches and Google News.

Erick also points us to another awesome post from Danny Sullivan of Search Engineland: Google's Love For Newspapers & How Little They Appreciate It.

Favorite excerpt:

Perhaps all the papers should get together like Anthony Moor of the Dallas Morning News suggests in the same article:

"I wish newspapers could act together to negotiate better terms with companies like Google. Better yet, what would happen if we all turned our sites off to search engines for a week? By creating scarcity, we might finally get fair value for the work we do."

Please do this, Anthony. Please get all your newspaper colleagues to agree to a national "Just say no to Google" week. I beg you, please do it. Then I can see if these things I think will happen do happen:

Papers go "oh shit," we really get a lot of traffic from Google for free, and we actually do earn something off those page views

Papers go "oh shit," turns out people can find news from other sources

Papers go "oh shit," being out of Google didn't magically solve all our other problems overnight, but now we have no one else to blame.

Labels: Associated Press, Google, Search Engine Land, TechCrunch, Wall Street Journal