What do we do about Google? The Great Debate

World Association of Newspapers

What do we do about Google? The Great Debate

Paris, France and Darmstadt, Germany, 11 November 2009

Applaud our gains in web site traffic? Develop closer partnerships with Google and their competitors? Launch our own search engines and collective news portals? Lobby to change or enforce copyright laws online? Sue - or encourage anti-trust cases? What DO we do about Google?

The Great Debate at the 62nd World Newspaper Congress in Hyderabad, India (1-3 December next) will examine these and other such questions as news publishers world-wide examine and discuss their options and strategies for getting a bigger slice of the internet advertising revenues which are today being massively reaped by Google.

David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Council of Google, will be on stage to give the search giant’s perspectives. Gavin O'Reilly, CEO of Independent News & Media and President of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), and the participants will debate with him. In the moderator’s chair: Kees Spaan, Chairman of the Copyright Working Party of the European Newspaper Publishers Association.

Mr Drummond leads Google’s global teams for legal, government relations, corporate development and new business development, including strategic partnerships. Before joining Google in 2002, he served as its first outside counsel and worked with Larry Page and Sergey Brin to incorporate the company and secure its initial round of financing.

Gavin O’Reilly was probably the first major news industry personality to publicly criticise Google, when he called them `kleptomaniacs’ in a 2006 speech where he said they were ``increasingly aiming their strategic efforts at traditional content originators and aggregators like newspaper publishers. The irony is that these search engines exist, largely, because of the traditional news and content aggregators and profit at their expense’’.

Since then, others have joined in the chorus of opposition, most notably Rupert Murdoch, who said last month: ``The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. If we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators Šwho will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.’’ Mr Murdoch just this week threatened to block Google News from taking any content from News Corp web sites.

News Corp will be represented at the Congress by Les Hinton, Chief Executive of Dow Jones & Co., the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, who will speak about the company’s multi-media strategies, including plans to shift away from free content on the internet.

Full details of the 62nd World Newspaper Congress, 16th World Editors Forum and Info Services Expo 2009, the global meetings of the world's press organised by WAN-IFRA, can be found at http://www.wanindia2009.com.

There is still time to register! Special measures have been taken by Indian authorities to facilitate the processing of visas for Congress and Forum participants and Hyderabad is linked by direct flights to major cities in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Other Congress and Forum speakers include:

- Andreas Wiele, Member of the Board /President BILD Division and Magazines, Axel Springer AG, Germany;

- Olivier Fleurot, CEO, Public Relations, Corporate and Financial Communications, Events Management for Publicis Groupe;

- Mahendra Mohan Gupta, Chairman/Managing Director and Managing Editor, Jagran Prakashan Ltd, India;

- Ravi Dhariwal, CEO Publishing, Bennett, Coleman & Co. (Times Group), India;

- John Paton, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of impreMedia LLC, United States;

- Martim Figueiredo, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, `i’ daily newspaper, Portugal;

- Gerd Finkbeiner, Chairman of the Executive Board, manroland AG, Germany;

- Jaideep Bose, Editor-in-chief, Times of India;

- James Orr, Online News Editor, The Christian Science Monitor, USA;

- Paul Johnson, Deputy Editor-in-chief, The Guardian, UK;

- Steve Engelberg, Managing Editor, Propublica.org, USA;

- Harinder Baweja, Co-Editor-in-Chief, Tehelka, India;

- And many more!

The conferences will be opened by Pratibha Patil the President of India. Full details at http://www.wanindia2009.com.

Added value: ``The Future of Cost Cutting and Business Efficiencies,’’ an outsourcing study tour, will be conducted following at Congress and Forum.

For full details of the 4 to 7 December tour, which will take participants to Mumbai, New Delhi and Bangalore, can be found at http://www.wan-press.org/indiatour2009.

WAN-IFRA, based in Paris, France, and Darmstadt, Germany, with subsidiaries in Singapore, India, Spain, France and Sweden, is the global organisation of the world’s newspapers and news publishers. It represents more than 18,000 publications, 15,000 online sites and over 3,000 companies in more than 120 countries. The organisation was created by the merger of the World Association of Newspapers and IFRA, the research and service organisation for the news publishing industry.

ENDS

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