Further to my post before:News Ltd John Hartigan lashes out at bloggers

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has told a group of editors that he is confident that newspapers will find new ways to make money online by harnessing the vast reach of the internet.

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From the Stuff.co.nz today: News Ltd lashes out at bloggers

News Limited’s chief executive, John Hartigan, has launched a broadside on bloggers and other online amateurs, arguing they are no substitute for professional journalists.

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Ann Woolner, Bloomberg News Columnist, wrote that Newspapers need to control internet ‘parasite’.

In this article, she highlighted the fact that search engines and news aggregators gobble up news often without paying the producers a penny.

This sort of thing “leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications,” as former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon put it this month before a Senate subcommittee.

“The parasite is slowly killing the host,” testified Simon, author and writer of the HBO series The Wire.

While journalists and entrepreneurs look, belatedly, for a way to make journalism work online, newspapers are going bankrupt, their staffs shrinking.

One particular thing that interests me is this:

Thanks in part to a steady diet of free food, Google has grown into a worldwide giant while newspapers have had their guts hollowed out.

Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thompson even specifically slammed Google as “parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet” back in April 2009.

While I agree on her points in regards to news aggregators (i.e., scrappers), she pointedly included Google in the same class. Is it true that Google is a parasite and is killing the newspaper industry?

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