Everything Is Possible

The man who helps run Google News thinks all this antagonism with the print media is just silly. And says they get on great with Rupert Murdoch, despite that silly man's silly talk of removing his newspapers from their search.
In an interview with the New York Observer Josh Cohen, Google News' senior business project manager (they need catchier titles over there) says the controversy between his service and publishers is mostly "a media concoction that "makes for a good story."

A good story that then appears on Google News. But anyway. Cohen, 40, who's based in Google's Chelsea offices, says he has daily conversations with publishers and that his relationship with them is good or even great. New features which allow publishers to customize what appears and present it in shiny ways — like this, which launched today — are helping too, he adds. But the main thing is that it's not his fault newspapers are dying:

There are a number of factors of why newspapers are facing these issues today," he said. "I mean, pick any one, whether it's declining circulation rates, migration of classified ads, we could spend a half an hour. There's no one single solution, as in there's no one single cause for it.

Send an email to Ravi Somaiya, the author of this post, at ravi@gawker.com.