News. Technology. Ramblings.

Is having to go to just one place (Google News) for searching any news (Thanks or no thanks to RSS feeds) help live the news providers for long. We definitely have seen the ad revenue’s failing for most news agencies. And recently Wall Street journal assessed Washington Post’s online experiment a failure.

I see a basic flaw in the whole “new media” experiments. Say a local news agency “A” produces a story, a journalist puts in effort. However for the news organization to pay for it, it depends on news ads. However using RSS feeds, you can get this story or search it in Google News, which indexes most news websites online. And most news websites with smaller budgets are still not able to develop technologies which will push ads to any incoming links.

Business Week columnist Roben Farzad has partially funny but very interesting take on why news indexing websites, especially Google.

Although Google profits wildly in the process, it won’t pony up the money to station and protect correspondents in Baghdad, nor will it pick up the martini tab when a reporter interviews a hedge fund manager’s whistleblowing mistress.

Last year saw the largest cut in U.S. news staffs in three decades, with the online-only side failing to grow sufficiently to absorb all the jobs lost from print. The ad revenues and market values of U.S. newspapers and magazines have effectively been annexed by Google.