Google’s going to spend $1 billion over the next three years paying publishers for their news, Joshua Benton of NiemanLab wrote yesterday. That money will license publishers’ content for a new feature in Google News called Google News Showcase.
"That’s a billion dollars that publishers didn’t have before, and it’s better to have a billion dollars than to not have a billion dollars. (Or so I’m told.) I am squarely in the take-the-money camp here," Benton wrote.
"But you have to remember: Google’s interactions with the news industry are always fundamentally about its interests, not publishers’."
