Newspapers in Brazil: 'Nuts' to Google News

Google Brazil (Photo credit: kulo)

In an unprecedented action by a newspaper association against search engine leviathan Google, the National Association of Newspapers in Brazil ("ANJ") has urged its 154 member papers that comprise 90 percent of the country's newspaper circulation to abandon Google News.

As reported by the Journalism in the Americas blog of the Knight Center for Journalism in America (knightcenter@utexas.edu), a heated debate at the Inter American Press Assn.'s 68th General Assembly earlier this month in Sao Paulo sparked the ANJ action over Google's continued refusal to compensate papers for use of their headlines. In December 2010, ANJ and the search engine giant agreed that Google would just display the headline and one line from stories that would link to the Brazilian newspapers.

Google argues that Google News channels more than 1 billion clicks to news sites globally to the sites' benefit. News sites, however, consider Google a direct competitor. Serasa Experian, a Brazilian digital marketing firm, reports Google has more than a 92 percent market share among search engines in Brazil.