Zac Echola is muffin but trouble

Uncategorized: What the hell is Zell smoking?

Published on 06/04/07
by Zac Echola

Saw this via Romenesko this morning:

Journalists produce the news that search engines such as Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. seamlessly and freely make available to anyone with a computer, Zell said during a presentation on corporate governance at Stanford University. “If all the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content for nothing, what would Google do, and how profitable would Google be?” the Chicago real estate maverick mused.

His answer: Not very.

Steal?

Indexing is now theft? That’s a bit ridiculous. I’d like to see if news Web sites could survive without referral traffic from search engines. I’d speculate all newspapers get on average of 15% to 25% of their traffic from search engines. Which could result in huge losses in value of Web sites in the eyes of advertisers, if these sites were suddenly cut off from the traffic generator.

But to call links with headlines (which is all Google uses) and with briefs (like Topix or Yahoo!) stealing is beyond gall. It a blasphemous misunderstanding of Internet basics.

There’s been a lot of fawning chatter the past few days about how Zell is going to save the American newspaper. Well, with that kind of attitude I’m going to have to assume his plans are actually to run it into the ground.

The end. Or is it?

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