OPEN

Former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil has called on the UK media to stop "managing decline" in the face of competition from the web and look at online as a major opportunity.

Speaking at the Society of Editors last night (live blogged on Fleet Street 2.0, part two here) he also said that Google’s relationship with content producers needed to be addressed: "I think it is time for a conversation with Google. They have the money, they should pay for it."

In the heads of Neil and a significant number of others they maybe imagine that Google has ads on Google News: it doesn’t. Yet. I think they imagine that newspaper and magazine content is the most prominent and widely used content for people searching on Google – it’s not.

Google is a convenient scapegoat for editors and publishers, who haven’t yet arrived at a way of explaining and understanding how their former audiences and communities of interest work in the age of networks, nor what their role is in it.

Google is infrastructure. Google wins because it is useful to web users.

Publishers need to think about Google the way online retailers and marketers have learned to: a fact of life. One of the most important facts of life online, one you need to understand, work with, prepare for.

As John Battelle said in The Search "as far as the internet ecosystem is concerned, Google is the weather".

I would offer that if they want to share Google revenues a good way might be to put AdSense on their websites.

Smart editors, journalists and publishers need to think bigger about how their organisations will need to change. Neil’s right – there are massive opportunities – there always are for smart people and companies  in times of disruption and change. Hoping Google will sort it all out for you is a distraction.

Fleet Street 2.0 asks:

Haven’t we been through this before?

Well, no. Neil’s argument is more sophisticated than most aggregator critics’. If news is a mere commodity, he argues, few publishers will have an incentive to take the sometimes grave risks necessary to report it. This could be interesting..

Keep watching the commentary – it will be illuminating to hear where the debate goes, especially when Nathan Stoll, product manager for Google News joins the debate.