Necessary evil

Reader question: What is "necessary evil"?

My comments:

Evil but necessary is the short answer.

"Necessary evil" is a phrase best used in paradoxical situations where you find something unpleasant (evil) but necessary (something you have to do or accept in order to achieve what you want).

In a Guardian column (Newspapers and search, March 13, 2006), for instance, Jeff Jarvis called Google "something between a necessary evil and a friend". Evil, in the sense that Google excerpts newspapers' content on its pages "and making money there". Necessary because without Google, the most visible news organizations just won't be, well, so visible. Jarvis wrote:

"The World Association of Newspapers is portraying Google as an enemy of news. I wouldn't say that. I'd call Google something between a necessary evil and a friend - and if news organizations are smart, they will learn how to befriend the beast. The Paris-based WAN, which represents 72 national newspaper associations, has joined with a posse of 11 European publishing groups to seek help from the EU and to threaten legal action against Google for excerpting members' content on its pages and making money there. One publisher calls this 'stealing', another 'napsterisation'. They are not alone in their fear, resentment and digital cluelessness. Agence France Presse sued Google to try to stop it from quoting the wire service's content. American book publishers are also trying to stop Google from indexing their text.

"At this month's Online Publishers Association conference in London, WAN managing director Ali Rahnema asked: 'Could this content exist if someone else wasn't paying to create it?' Well, in the quaint Americanism of my hillbilly roots, I'd say Rahnema got this bassackwards. Instead, we soon will be asking, 'Could this content exist if someone else wasn't linking to it?'

"The truth is that today, Google is every site's front page. If you can't find content via searches, or via aggregators such as GoogleNews and Digg.com, or via links from blogs, then the content and the brand behind it might as well not exist. This is how online sites get traffic. This is the means of distributing your content online. If you don't like it, there are easy ways to stop it: you can place a file on your website to tell Google and other robots to stay away, or you can put your content behind a registration or pay wall. But to cut yourself off from search and links is like taking your paper off the newsstand and making people go out of their way to find it. What sane publisher would do that?

"Sane publishers are, instead, engaging in the black art of the age: 'search-engine optimization' (SEO), which means making your content easily findable via Google and company. I am a believer. Full disclosures: I work with the New York Times Company's About.com, which has become a top-10 site via SEO. It is a wonder. I am also working with a startup that, not unlike Google, organizes news, because I believe this will help bring readers to relevant reporting. And I advise newspapers that all their content - including their archives - should be online, for every search engine, aggregator and blog to find."

You get the idea.

Mark Twain once said that "work is a necessary evil to be avoided." I'm sure that's correct, but if you're a beginner on a job, you must be careful if you want to follow Twain to a T.

Twain, you see, was lucky - He didn't have a real job. He as a writer did not have to sit the regular office hours, come to all the time-wasting meetings and generally put himself under the mercy of bosses, naming but a few "evils" at the office.

He wrote for a living. And he probably would have called writing "a labor of love" instead.