Newspapers understand Google as well as LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell

Yesterday Google began hosting stories and photographs distributed by the AP, Agence France-Presse, The Press Association in the United Kingdom and The Canadian Press. These licensing deals arose out of settlements resolving the news services’ claims that Google had been infringing on their copyrights by displaying snippets as part of Google News.

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. From Forbes today:

It could diminish Internet traffic to newspaper and broadcast companies’ Web sites where those stories and photos are also found – a development that could reduce those companies’ revenue from online advertising.

Prior to this change, Google linked to AP news stories. When a user of Google News clicked on an AP story they were sent to one of the hundreds of news Web sites that had the right to post the same article on their online editions. As Forbes explains, “That helped drive more traffic to the Web sites of newspapers and broadcasters who pay annual fees to help finance the AP, a 161-year-old cooperative owned by news organizations.”

Now, Google visitors interested in reading an AP story will remain on Google’s Web site. Any advertisng would be displayed on Google. There’s a real risk that this move will result in more traffic for Google and less traffic for the vast majority of AP’s customers whose only area of increased revenues is online advertising.

I’m sure news services have other reasons for their action. But I see it as not wanting Google to index their content without Google paying for it. You know – we worked hard to produce our content and we’re not giving it away.

As Jeff Jarvis says, these guys don’t get it.

I think this all displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of Google in the new news architecture and the way to take advantage of that. Rather than getting Google to pay for and display full content, wouldn’t it have been better for the industry — and, by extension, original journalism — to encourage it instead to find more ways to link to reporting at its source?

Same thing is going on with the LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell lawyer directory. Rather than making sure all of their customers’ lawyer bios and law firm profiles are in a web architecture that Google can index for high search engine performance, Martindale appears to want to limit the indexing of their content.

Martindale appears to want those selecting a lawyer to come directly to their martindale.com site. Wouldn’t it serve Martindale’s customers better to get their information indexed at Google so Internet users would follow links at Google to the lawyer bios and firm profiles at martindale.com?

Like it or not, the business of news and publishing has changed. Links to your content are key. The more links, the more traffic, the more in advertising revenues. In Martindale’s case, the more law firms will pay to be in their directory.