Google, Facebook ought to pay for news they use
By The Herald Editorial Board
We’ve made the point previously that — at a time when newspapers across the country are laying off staff, when not closing papers altogether — newspapers and other media outlets do make money; it’s just that a good chunk of that money isn’t going to the print and broadcast operations that pay reporters, photographers and others who are doing the work of journalism.
Click on a link in a Google search or on a news story on Facebook and the revenue from their advertising doesn’t go to the outlet that produced that story but to the social media giants themselves.
A study from 2019, published by the News Media Alliance, found that Google alone made an estimated $4.7 billion in revenue in 2018 by “crawling and scraping news publishers’ content — without paying the publishers for that use.”
That’s a parasitic diversion of funds that media outlets need as the nation emerges from a devastating pandemic, which hit when newspapers already were facing long-standing losses of revenue from advertising as news media outlets make the transition from print to digital.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/editorial-google-facebook-ought-to-pay-for-news-they-use/
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