Why is Google making more money everyday while newspapers are making less? I’m going to pick on the Washington Post again only because it’s my local paper and this is a local example.
There were severe storms in the Washington area today, and the power went out in our Reston, Va., office. I wanted to find some information about the status of power outages to see whether we should go into the office tomorrow. Here’s what I found on the homepage of WashingtonPost.com:
This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."
We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.
The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.
That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
