Old Media Wants A Piece Of The New Media Action

Google, now the world’s most highly valued media company, finds itself stepping on the toes of established players as it tries to extend its Web dominance into new domains.

The World Association of Newspapers last week accused Google and other search engines of not paying for the excerpts of news sites they display in search results. The accusation mirrored recent complaints from book publishers over Google indexing their copyrighted material, and points to more skirmishes with the traditional media industry as it weighs the benefits of making it easier for consumers to find their content versus the risk of aggregators profiting at their expense.

Gavin O’Reilly, president of WAN, a Paris-based group representing 18,000 newspapers, issued a statement last week that search engines like Google are “using the content flow of newspapers to build businesses that will ultimately compete with us.”