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This post is a recap and review of a Web 2.0 Summit session from October, 2009.

In this video, John Battelle, the panel moderator, talks with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Google and The Huffington Post.  There are some tense moments and, in my opinion, The Times and The Journal shine.  In short, I think The Times and The Journal need better management to help them figure out how to monetize their assets but Google’s a cheat and The Huffington Post is a thief.

There are some great quotes in this video.  Around 5:40, John Battelle, asks Marissa Mayer from Google to talk about the value of being a “distributor of attention.”  Marissa says that Google directs all this traffic and attention and money to various organizations.  I love how Robert Thomson of The Wall Street Journal disagrees around 7:00.  He says, “Google wants to be the homepage, wants to be the front page.  Marissa unintentionally encourages promiscuity.”  He’s saying that Google isn’t distributing attention, they’re basically stealing content from the creator (digital disloyalty).  I love that and agree – Google isn’t providing value to The Times and The Journal, they’re stealing the content created by those organizations for their own profit.  If you wanted news, you could go to the news organization that best earns your business.  Google’s not a news organization.  I see that Google provides value by aggregating the content but I believe they are doing more of a disservice to those organizations than providing benefit.  They aren’t giving enough credit for what they are taking.  They aren’t distributing enough attention to the content creators.

It gets better, though.  At 11:35, John makes a great point and asks for feedback, “[Google and The Huffington Post] kind of look at everything that’s already out there that is original content, you know, it’s been written by The Times or written by The Journal and then sort of puts a gloss of commentary on it and links back to the original content.  But the argument that is made, perhaps by the gentlemen on either side of you [Marissa from Google and Eric Hippeau of The Huffington Post], is ‘but we actually do the reporting and get the story and we aren’t getting enough credit.’”  Martin Nisenholtz of The New York Times says he wouldn’t make that argument [that he’s not getting enough credit].  He clarifies, “I’m not cool with theft of copy write and I think that The Huffington Post is guilty of that on way too many occasions.”

I had never considered how much money it must cost to put journalists in the field and how important of a job they play.  Some of them are putting their lives at risk to tell a story to us back home of what’s going on around the world.  They shed light on injustice and keep humanity honest.  In my opinion, organizations like The Journal and The Times aren’t getting enough of an opportunity to recoup the cost of their reporting.  I have concerns that many news organizations are being squeezed because they can’t make the profits they need to continue operations and we’re eventually going to have nothing but soft news.