Thursday, October 22, 2009

Newspapers now blame links for their woes

Links are the very essence of the Internet (and it would not be the World Wide Web without them). So its with some amazement that I read Struan Bartlett's open letter to a bunch of newspaper groups.
http://newsnow.co.uk/press/openletter.html
Why? Well it would seem the Managing Director of NewsNow has been threatened with legal action if his company (amongst others) doesn't stop linking to newspaper sites or accept 'controls'.

So, let me get this right.... the newspaper industry is in a complete tail-spin, aggregators drive traffic to these newspaper sites and the newspapers now want to stop this acivity?

Wouldn't they be better-off finding out how to retain whatever custom they could rather than going after those who are actually providing them with readers and search engine optimisation assistance?

Note:
Being a huge aggregator of newspaper content, did Google get one of these threats? I bet not!

in reference to: NewsNow: An Open Letter to the UK's national, regional and local newspapers (view on Google Sidewiki)

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