By Danny Sullivan
It was a hostile audience. It was June 2007, at a conference center in London, where newspaper and magazine publishers were hearing how a new industry-backed search engine rights standard called ACAP was coming along. The day ended with an "issues" oriented panel. The audience didn't seem that pleased with me telling them they were full of shit about how important they thought they were and how awful they thought they had it from Google in particular.
I didn't phrase it like that, but that was the essence of my attitude. I'd rarely encountered so many people in one place with such a sense of entitlement. Worse, these were supposedly my own people. Newspaper folks, where I got my start in journalism. What an embarrassment.
I'm not talking the rank-and-file of newspapers, however -- the reporters and editors doing the grunt work. This crowd was full of publishers or editors of a different type, not wordsmithing and story assignment but looking out for the business issues.
ACAP -- the Automated Content Access Protocol -- was a convoluted system being developed at the time to "solve" the problems that newspapers and some other publishers felt they had with search engines. In particular, that they felt they should be able to selectively decide which pictures could be printed, how long stories could be listed and a number of other things all of which largely already could be controlled through existing systems (my past post, Search Engines, Permissions & Moving Forward In Copyright Battles, goes into this in more depth).
ACAP's real goal, of course, was to establish a way that newspapers could demand Googlegeld, their own version of Danegeld, a tribute tax they felt entitled to get just for being listed in Google. The panel started with a progress report on how ACAP was going, with the audience then asking the panel questions or simply making statements.
Over and over, people kept using the phrase "quality publishers" and how they hoped ACAP would protect these publishers and how "many" publishers were behind it.
I'd had enough. I can't recall my exact spiel, but it went something like this. I explained to that group that ACAP was far from backed by most publishers. That on the internet, there were millions of publishers, while the newspaper groups backing ACAP mounted to a few hundred, if that. That these millions of publishers have a diverse set of concerns about search engines that ACAP was far from addressing, since it was so newspaper-centric. That an online shopping site is also a publisher, as is a small blog, as is a social media site, as is a vertical news site -- and none of these groups had been invited to participate in the hallowed discussion of a supposed new robots.txt 2.0 system.
I also explained that unlike virtually all other publishers on the internet, newspapers were given extraordinary special status with Google. They were among the very select few to be admitted into Google News and receive the huge amounts of traffic it could send their ways. That many small blogs with excellent content struggle for admittance that these other publishers just got handed to them on a silver platter.
I then got very personal. I explained that I was also a journalist, publishing what I considered to be quality content as well. Indeed, I've published content on my topic (search engines) that I know has been of far superior quality than that published by many supposedly "quality" publications. So for them to argue they were somehow "quality publications" deserving special treatment was arrogant not to mention simply incorrect.
And now I'm hearing the same old crap again, and I'm feeling the same way I did back then. Some samples in the past few days. First from Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal:
Meantime Thomson said it was "amusing" to read media blogs and comment sites, all of which traded on other people's information.
"They are basically editorial echo chambers rather than centres of creation, and the cynicism they have about so-called traditional media is only matched by their opportunism in exploiting the quality of traditional media," he said.
Robert, I've been creating original content on the internet for about 12 years longer than you've been editor of the WSJ. Shut up. Seriously, shut up. To say something like that simply indicates you really do not understand that all blogs are not echo chambers.
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