Neil to Google: we want our cut

[Keyword: journalism, online journalism, citizen journalism, blogging]. Andrew Neil has a strong opinion on Google's news aggregation service, as Roy Greenslade reports:

"The BBC broadcaster and chief executive of the Barclay brothers' group, Press Holdings, not only launched a by now familiar attack on Google's news aggregation service but, pertinently, castigated the media industry for not clubbing together to demand payment for content just as the music and broadcasting industry was doing to YouTube.

""We don't charge them a penny for our hard-earned journalism, the former Sunday Times editor said in the conference's opening lecture. "It's time for a conversation with Google. They can afford it.""

This is a much more refreshing approach than the Belgian newspaper which sued Google to stop it publishing its articles. 'Cutting off your nose to spite your face' sprang to mind then, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect Google to give a cut of advertising to content providers. Remember the time when "content was king" and wannabe 'portals' were scrambling to pay publishers for feeds that could draw users in?

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