Should newspapers sue Google and Yahoo as a class action?

Distribution may be worth it to you, but not to the paper.
It's not a revenue stream. And until it is, newspapers will lay more people off.

 

Maybe somebody else can remember the major-newspaper-company effort to build a portal that fell apart when not everybody wanted to play. Some of the bigs were in, but some (NYT? Gannett?) weren't. The details are fuzzy ... and this was eons ago, maybe 1997-98. I'll probably think of it at 3 a.m.

 

Wow. Just think had that gone through ...

 

So we are our own worst enemy. Slash and cut baby!!!

 

Is that Gannett production you're thinking of the current Topix.net?

 

No, but it's interesting you mention that. I just stumbled across that this past week.

 

I didn't realize that was Gannett.

 

From the Web site:

Topix is the leading news community on the Web, connecting people to the information and discussions that matter to them in every U.S. town and city.

A Top 25 online news destination (Hitwise, February 2007), the site links news from 50,000 sources to 360,000 lively user-generated forums. Topix also works with the nation's major media companies to grow and engage their online audiences through forums, classifieds, publishing platforms and RSS feeds.

Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Topix LLC is a privately held company with investment from Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI), The McClatchy Company (NYSE: MNI) and Tribune Company (NYSE: TRB).

 

What about Lexis Nexis? They seem to have access to everything but costs so much with the subscriber fees. Would be neat to see them expand their newspaper resources to a public browser. Might be suicide from a business standpoint, I wouldn't know, but like I said they already do such a good job of aggregating stories.

 

Not a chance in hell of winning. FAIR USE.

They are not steling your stories, they are just referring you to them.

 

That's true. But it also guide eyes to the paper's web site, which is essential for any hope of getting ad revenue.

Every trend is that more money is being spent online. So you need an audience to get a cut of that money. Cutting yourself off from Google would be suicide.