By: Lauren Fox
Google and the News in 2007
In 2007, Neil Henry, a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley began lamenting about how google was responsible for the decline of investigative journalism during one of his lectures.
He referred specifically to the San Francisco Chronicle and its shrinking newsroom. He addressed the types of investigative journalism that were at risk of being defunded: government investigations, corporate investigations and more.
During his lecture he raised an interesting question about whether Google and other online search engines should start subsidizing journalism. He argued that sites such as Google and Yahoo were indirectly benefiting from the expensive labor of journalists and should start taking responsibility for their plight.
His point was that google was profiting off the advertising they sold on the page where the search engine also had links to news sources. (He must not have thought about the fact that without search engine optimization, newspapers would be almost unsearchable online.)
“I see a world where corporations such as Google and Yahoo continue to enrich themselves with little returning to journalistic enterprises, all this ultimately at the expense of legions of professional reporters across America, now out of work because their employers in “old” media could not afford to pay them,” Henry said.
Google offers to help
Three years later and Google has not just accepted some responsibility for declining print revenues, but they have insisted on helping the news industry figure out how to become profitable once again.
James Fallows of the Atlantic recently wrote an article chronicling Google’s dilemma with regard to news. Fallows said that Google wants to fix the newspaper industry not solely for philanthropic or civic reasons, but for commercial ones as well. The company’s thought process is that if news organizations cease to create accurate and investigative journalism pieces than the search engine will no longer have interesting and reliable content to link to.
The symbiotic relationship between organizations such as the New York Times that create content and the corporations such as Google that profit off that content by making it a searchable commodity, is forcing Google to forge the fight to save the news business in its entirety.
That means creating a new and more sustainable business model for the industry, and Google has not hesitated to make suggestions regarding the ways in which the newspapers could improve.
Finding a new business model
Google’s chief economist, Hal Variam, urges newspapers to move away from the hard copy business model. Variam says that since 1947 the number of newspapers bought per family has dwindled every year leading to a gradual decrease in subsription profits and advertising profits.
“If you were starting from scratch, you could never possibly justify this business model,” Variam said. “Grow trees then grind them up, and truck big rolls of paper down from Canada? Then run them through enormously expensive machinery, hand-deliver them overnight to thousands of doorsteps, and leave more on newsstands, where the surplus is out of date immediately and must be thrown way.”
Instead, Variam and others at Google suggest newspapers move to a completely online model, which would be convenient considering that Google cannot profit from hard copies of newspapers.
“Nothing that I see suggest the ‘death of newspapers,”Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in the Atlantic in March. “Today you have a subscription to a print newspaper and in the future model, you’ll have subscriptions to information sources that will have advertisements embedded in them.”
Many who work in the newspaper business such as New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller argue that moving to a completely online model is unfeasible at this time because advertising online is not near as profitable as placed ads in newsprint.
However, Google executives promise that the news industry is just in the “transitional stage” and soon will begin to see advertising profits online that are equal to what they saw in their print product during the late 1980s.
Google executives argue that internet advertisers are getting dangerously close to being able to identify each specific user on a computer and direct advertisements to his or her specific interests in a way that fully bundled and general newspaper ads never could. Before, newspapers were only able to correspond advertisements to the specific section that the ads fell in. For example greenhouse ads went in an outdoor living section of a newspaper and advertisements for women’s clothing went into the style section.
The vertical integration between the news source and the search engine that directs attention toward it, is a tricky balance of philanthropy and self-interest.
Google experiments in ways to organize news
Compared to what Google could use for bragging rights, they have remained almost silent on the issue because they say that they are still in the early development stages of helping the news industry. (It should be noted that Google said that they were still in the development stages with their search engine function until three months ago.Even though the search engine has existed for more than five years.) Fallows also claims that news organizations working with Google have also chosen to stay quiet.
In April, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, gave an address to a group of editors at their annual convention. He assured them that he would do everything in his power to make sure that the news business would continue to exist well into the future.
Taking it a step further, he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal announcing that Google would be going out of its way to develop new business models that would guarantee more money for struggling news organizations. His choice of paper also made a statement.
Rupert Murdoch has blamed Google numerous times for the newspaper industry’s demise.
Regardless of what Murdoch thinks, Google’s web researchers have begun looking into what makes newspapers effective and what makes than ineffective.
Leading media developer Krishna Bharat has been a head researcher on projects such as Living Stories, which tried to combat a common complaint against news sources that articles are often repetitive and present the same information over and over again. Living Stories, which existed from December 2009 to February 2010 worked in collaboration with two of the country’s leading newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
In Living Stories, complete coverage of an on-going story was placed together and prioritized under one URL. Each story included an evolving summary of developments as a well as an interactive timeline of those events. Stories could be explored by themes, significant participants or multimedia. Updates to the stories were highlighted each time viewers returned to the URL making it so readers were not forced to read the same information over again.
In 2009, Youtube, a site owned by Google. (Talk about synergy) posted a video showing readers how to use Living Stories.
Another complaint against newspapers that Google executives attempted to fix was the fact that online reading can be dense and difficult to page through. To combat that problem, Bharat helped to develop Fast Flip.
Fast Flip began in June 2009 to simulate the feeling of flipping through a magazine or newspaper. It works by loading newspaper and magazine pages quickly onto a screen as they would appear in their original format. In less than a year more than 90 american-based print mediums are part of the Fast Flip.
“It gives you a sense of the graphics, the emphasis, the quality, the feel of a hard copy,” Bharat said regarding the Fast Flip application.
Google also suggested to newspapers that they begin to use YouTube more broadly. Researchers said that YouTube, which is owned by Google, could help news organizations engage with their audience.
Google suggested that newspapers use the site to gather citizen-generated news footage. Google said that hyperlocal videos could help to create a two-way dialogue between professional reporters and their readership as well as contribute to a wider range of content for their sites.
A long way to go
Whatever the solution, Google researchers say that they are confident that ten years from now, a robust and even stronger media will exist. They say that they want to be on the leading edge of that movement to make sure that the dream becomes a reality.
However, readers and newspapers alike must ask themselves whether or not Google is really serving newspapers or whether they are just trying to serve themselves.
Should Google Subsidize Journalists
Fast Flip and Living Stories now on Google News
