Arianna on Murdoch: “a fundamental lack of understanding of the web”

Posted on | December 3, 2009 | Comments Off

Thinking that removing your content from Google will somehow keep it “exclusive” shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the web and how it works. As an experiment, Google the key terms from any interesting story currently kept behind a paywall, on the Wall Street Journal, for instance. And imagine no News Corp. source being included in the search results. You’d still get dozens and dozens of links to other sources — including many of the biggest news sites — writing about the story, riffing on it, quoting from it, and commenting on the key facts in it. So what are you going to do, try to make the case that no one should be able to talk about or write about or comment on or report on the stories you make them pay for? It’s a ridiculous notion.

An excerpt from Arianna Huffington’s speech to a journalism conference in Washington DC, in which she questions the ‘….increasingly bellicose war against new media sites that aggregate the news….’, a war orchestrated mainly by Rupert Murdoch and News International.

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