The European mainstream media is starting to get uppity about losing their role as the primary source of news, in the wake of services like Google News which stand to make them nothing more than mere content vendors like the record labels supplying Apple's iTunes Music Store. Me thinks that the lady doth protest too much.

According to an Associated Press article, Francisco Pinto Balsemao backed French news agency AFP, which is suing Google for including its content on its news site.

"It is fascinating to see how these companies 'help themselves' to copyright-protected material, build up their own business models around what they have collected, and parasitically, earn advertising revenue off the back of other people's content," he said.

They are well aware of the fact that Google does not actually resell their content and is not violating any copyright laws by offering their services. The reason that they are raising a stink about this is because Google News threatens to cripple their advertising if people end up using it over their websites. There is not a whole lot of difference between a blog post and an online version of a newspaper article and thus they are much more conducive to being accessed via RSS and other aggregation methods than through the monolithic "go to our site and browse a lot first" approach that they need to get good advertising.

Ultimately that's what this is all about: advertising. If they simply feed aggregation services, they will not be able to reliably command the kind of pull that draws in the big advertising dollars/euros. The only way that they would be able to command strong advertising revenues would be to get such a strong reputation and pull from media buyers that they can get advertisers to be willing to take the risks associated with selling on a more article-to-article basis. The newspapers are currently accustomed to selling an entire paper, not articles. The advertising works on that basis and things are changing. Advertising will now be based much more on an article basis than a "total content" basis as exists with paper news sources.