((Hi there, how’s your weekend going? This is slightly off-topic for Quiet Babylon, but it’s about the future of journalism which is one of my side-obsessions.

It concerns this hilarious opinion piece to which Jay Rosen linked on Twitter. Douglas Rushkoff is afraid that journalism (and by extension all content creation) can’t survive what he sees as Google’s parasitism and sees in Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch a glimmer of hope. There is so much wrong with the argument.

Hope you enjoy it. I promise that Monday will be about lanyards and augmented reality.))

((Update: Check out this much more nuanced discussion of the value of visitors to a newspaper’s site. There are circumstances where it makes sense to be searchable by engines and circumstances where it doesn’t. Steve Yelvington adds a lot to the discussion.))

All quotes from The New Good Guys by Douglas Rushkoff. Published on the Daily Beast and indexed by Google.

Suddenly Murdoch and Microsoft are on the right side against the Google[sic]. Douglas Rushkoff says the two oft-despised companies are the best hope to defeat the Evil Empire.

((Note that this is an article about two competing business models. One involves making your content as available as possible and earning an income from or around traffic. The other involves limiting availablity of your content and earning premium income from a smaller group. That Rushkoff manages to twist this into an End Times battle between good and evil is endemic to his muddled thinking.))

Discussions between Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for a structure where the former’s search engine (Bing) would pay for exclusive rights to the latter’s content (Wall Street Journal, Fox, etc.) has proven instantly upsetting to the self-appointed defenders of a “free” Internet. The simple reason: it might just work.

((Rushkoff might be mistaking ridicule for anger. The reaction I’ve seen has been a mix of “I don’t think this will work”, “I’d like to see them try”, and “this might have something to do with the Myspace deal“. My personal favourite was Gawker’s ‘after’ shots of Google News without News Corp..))

Defying the logic that everything is more valuable the higher it climbs on Google’s search rankings, Rupert Murdoch is making good on his threat to pull out

((Rushkoff meant to say “is loudly talking about his threat to pull out”))

of Google searchability, altogether. Instead, he wants to be paid for his properties to show up in search results. And Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may be desperate enough for a competitive advantage against Google to take Murdoch up on the deal, and offer it to other media companies with content people really want to find.

((Man, this is really gripping war-for-the-soul-of-the-Internet stuff.))

Of course, the information-wants-to-be-free troops are already up in arms. Some welcome what they see as the extinction of both evil empires in an ill-conceived death grip that will push Fox News and the Wall Street Journal off the mainstream map. Others see it as a last-gasp effort by “old media” to resist the unstoppable, Google-driven evolution of an entirely free content universe. They see searchability by Google as equivalent to participation in democratic society—and any resistance to offering up one’s content to exploitation by Google Inc. as resistance to the natural openness of interactive media and bottom-up civilization.

((I’d like to meet these people. They seem entertaining.))

As an early cyberpunk, I see their point—as well as the confused logic informing it. Greedy monopolists

((one of whom was Murdoch))

controlled media for a long time, and formed huge conglomerates with interests beyond providing people with the content they needed.

((Does Rushkoff think that now that Google exists, this has changed?))

Media companies moved into the business of delivering eyeballs to sponsors, instead of content to readers. Recording companies bilked the artists who created the music. Taking content for free seems justified when it is being taken from big bad companies. And making content ourselves, as well as distributing it freely to one another, is now correctly understood as a basic human right.

((Oh, there’s the problem. Rushkoff is confusing piracy and publishing. When cyberpunk Rushkoff was using Napster to complete his Metallica collection, that was piracy and a fight against the big bad evil corporations. When I read a complete article on the WSJ for free through Google it’s because they made it available. The bizarro moral code here is fantastic. Unauthorized copying from large companies was OK because it hurts someone else and they probably cheated. Authorized reading is not OK because Google…forced…what?))

But we can’t confuse our actual right to make and distribute content freely with Google’s perceived right to freely exploit the content everyone makes.

((No one, least of all Google, is claiming that Google has that right. Google has explained over and over how Murdoch could delist News Corp. properties from the search engine if he was serious.))

Google is not in this for the fun of it; they make money off their searches. By making our content available to Google, we make Google’s searches more valuable. If we don’t feel our content is being made more valuable in the exchange, then we don’t have to accept this searchability as some precondition of Internet citizenship.

((Which is why all good search engines offer a method to turn off indexability. Robots.txt – It will solve your alleged problems.™))

However much we all might like free content in the short term, it is unsustainable in the long term.

((“It isn’t free to make, you know” finger waggling is my favourite all-purpose argument. It shows up everywhere!))

When nobody is paying for content, that content stops being created.

((It must drive Rushkoff bananas to be making the same argument that the record companies were making when cyberpunk Rushkoff was loading up Limewire))

If money can’t be made reporting and writing articles, then professionals simply can’t do it anymore.

((First they came for the music but I did not speak because I wasn’t a musician and anyway, evil corporate masters were bilking the artists. Then they came for the movies but I did not speak because Hollywood is destroying America. Then they came for the journalists…))

Unless we adopt the position that the amateur blogosphere is really capable of taking on the role that the New York Times and CNN play, then we do need solutions for paying for content.

((Home taping is killing music! VCRs will destroy movies! Napster will destroy music! The gramophone will destroy music! etc. (poor music)))

Advertising is certainly one option.

((Keeping score? Media companies delivering eyeballs to advertisers: Not OK in olden times. OK in current times, except that Google is hijacking those eyes.))

But when Google becomes the meta-frame around all the content in everyone else’s publications, then Google’s ads are the only ones that really matter. Google’s ads are the ones that show up when we are searching for content, and open to suggestion. That’s the Internet equivalent of the moment we are flipping through the magazine — not the time we are spending when we deep inside an article and oblivious to the extraneous information beckoning from beyond its borders. Once we have clicked on the article and are brought to the interior of the publication on offer, we go into content mode—reading, rather than searching for relevant information, including ads.

Since the search engine is now extracting the ad revenue that used to go to the content provider, it makes sense that the search engine should pay some of that forward.

((Sure, that’s one business model and with a little luck, we’ll get to see it in action if the Bing/News Corp. deal is more than just talk. But make no mistake, this is not a moral issue.

There’s another business model, which is to aggressively bring in as much traffic as possible, and make money from that. In that world, Google is free advertising for your publication. It’s lead generation. Guess what happens when you do a Google search for “Wall Street Journal”. You get an ad for the paper. The WSJ is paying Google for traffic while claiming that Google traffic isn’t valuable.

We’re still sorting out how to pay for good journalism and it’s not by any means clear that allowing your content to be indexed by search engines and displaying that content for free to everyone is the right answer. But regurgitating Murdoch’s argument without acknowledging that there is an easy remedy is irresponsible if not disengenuous.))

It is much too easy to look at this as two, crusty old monopolies battling against the young defender of open systems and human freedoms. I reflexively

((oh, there’s your problem))

hate to be on Murdoch or Microsoft’s side on pretty much any issue. But these waning media giants—along with Hearst, NBC, Bertelsmann, and even the New York Times—may just have enough power left between them to challenge the continuing, inexorable drive to make all content immediately open to exploitation, disconnected from its creators.

((Again, there’s that pesky piracy vs. publishing distinction. The content is available in search engines because everyone has chosen to make it available. It’s very easy to remove.))

Our labor is not free. Open source is a beautiful way of collaborating; but what’s happening on the free Internet is more akin to the “crowdsourcing” of journalists and other content creators by advertisers who no longer have to pay them—only the search engines that parse their articles. Why must everything we create or do be presumed free for everyone to use, in any context, and open to comments

((..what?))

from anyone in the world? Searching me, and what I create, should be a privilege enjoyed by those to whom I offer it—not a right bestowed onto every person, company, and government on the planet.

((Rushkoff is silent on the issue of non-Google entities linking to his work. Presumably he thinks that Rosen owes him a dollar for the Twitter link. Given that I linked, used, and commented without checking with Rushkoff, I have no idea how much I owe.))

Openness of this sort is not freedom. It’s the forced relinquishing of everything we do to the hive, and to Google. We end up with fewer new ideas, less original content,

((Photocopiers will kill publishing!))

and more links, copies and regurgitations of yesterday’s ideas. The people and companies who index ideas end up getting the money, while the people who actually have ideas and waste their time creating content end up broke.

So until we develop peer-to-peer currencies or come up with some other idea,

((Yes, perhaps one day someone might create a list of ideas for subsidizing the news. I sure hope to live long enough to see that day.))

we must pit the corporations who would exploit us against one another. By surrendering to just one publicly held company—no matter how little evil it says it wants to do—we doom ourselves to working for free.

((This is undeniably true. No one who has their content indexed in Google has managed to find a way to make a living at it.))