BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

Tag: google

  • I wouldn’t go shorting GOOG

    9 comments on I wouldn’t go shorting GOOG

    Scoble’s already-infamous video shtick says that social-graph-based search (Mahalo, Techmeme, Facebook) will kill Google. And here’s a German newspaper publisher, Christian DuMont Schütte, who says

    On my 50th birthday in the spring, I came up with the thesis: In 10 years, Google is dead. . . . We see the first signs already: The eBay euphoria is over. The lifecycle of internet ideas, in terms of content and technology, is completely different from conventional companies in the old economy. . . . (On the internet), the market can be conquered with new ideas again and again.

    They both make the mistake of thinking — hoping, perhaps — that Google is too big or too old or too successful to change. I wouldn’t bet on that.

    Scoble says it can’t change its algorithms because there’d be an outcry from those who depend on it. But watching companies that do depend on SEO, I can say that those algorithms change constantly. They just made a big architectural change adding in dynamic and multimedia information to search results. I would not assume that Google’s Jell-O is cold yet. Not by a long shot.

    There’s another good question here: Can Google layer the social map onto the content map? More on that later.

    : By the way, I agree with Dave.

  • What he says

    7 comments on What he says
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    In the comments below, Howard Owens responds to the LA Times in the conversation started by its editorial about GoogleNews new comment feature. Jon Healey of the Times worried that flacks and spinsters will use Google to flack and spin without reporters there to filter it. Howard advises:

    I don’t think you get it, Mr. Healey.

    Let’s say company X stonewalls, and then comments as you say … well, why do you think that ends the conversation. Company X just made news by their comments, not matter how untruthful. Your story just got better. The reporter goes and writes a story about the comments and debunks them. More truth is illuminated. Readers are better informed, and they have a clearer picture of who company x really is.

    This is better journalism. This is better civics.

    Google is HELPING you. And us. If it works (and I’m not sure it will, but I appreciate the effort).

    One of the main things that really bugged me about the LAT piece, and I still don’t think you get based on the above, is that you think readers are not smart enough. That’s the common journalistic hubris. If we aren’t there to guide readers and make sure their information is properly filtered and balanced, they won’t really be able to figure out things on their own and separate fact from spin, etc.

    But, how good has journalism done at that over the past couple of decades anyway?

    First, readers are smarter than most journalists give them credit for; Second, thanks to blogs and such, they’re getting smarter. The thing about the new information economy is we all have to be smarter, and that’s happening, because we’re largely on our own for filtering news and opinion. I, for one, thing that’s a good thing. It’s actually BETTER for democracy.

    Sometime you might want to walk across the hall and have a long conversation with Matt Welch about all this. It would help a lot.

    I emailed Matt — one of the first people to teach me how blogs and links and the distributed conversation work, back in the day — in the midst of all this when I wanted to see whether my take on the editorial was wrong. Matt was just returning from book leave (he’s about to come out with a book on John McCain) just as this kerfuffle was fuffling. But he did tell me that the Times is about to enable response on the opinion pieces his department produces. The bigger question, I think, is how to link a paper and its journalism into the larger distributed conversation in comments, links in outside blogs, and responses at GoogleNews. If someone responds anywhere, as Howard points out, the reporter should be ready to jump on that and do what reporters do: add journalism.

  • The L.A. Times responds

    8 comments on The L.A. Times responds
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    The LA Times just responded to my post about its excoriated editorial that reacted to the new GoogleNews feature enabling subjects in news stories to respond… at Google. Jon Healey writes:

    Hey, thanks for the post. It’s a sign of bad writing when so many people miss the point, and aside from you, just about everybody seems to have missed the point of this editorial. I’ll take the rap for that. The comment about Osama was meant to be ridiculously over the top because, as the Times’ editorial board has said in the past, publishers have been quite wrong about Google. And that includes the guy soon to be my boss. Maybe it was confusing to readers to include a non-genuflecting reference to the new boss….

    Anyway, some readers also seem to think we were criticizing Google by saying it’s not journalism. Umm, we’re not *that* hubristic. We were simply trying to remind people of the shortcomings inherent in its approach. For starters, unfiltered does not equate to true. And IMHO, it’s a really bad thing if people assumed that the comments are, in fact, screened for truth. They won’t be. That’s not to say newspaper stories are, but at least there’s often some critical thinking at work there.

    Here’s the scenario that really troubles me. Investigative reporter digs up tons of documents showing that Company X lied to regulators. Reporter calls Company X, which curtly denies wrongdoing and stonewalls. Reporter writes story, including denial. Company officials then use Google to launch a lengthy and utterly bogus defense of their behavior. Is that a value add by Google? Sure, it’s just as easy to dream up the opposite — where a reporter writes something that’s just plain wrong and Google provides what amounts to a high-profile forum for a correction. And maybe that will end up being the predominant use. But there’s no telling, and in the face of conflicting assertions, Google won’t be giving readers any help figuring out who’s right. As the editorial says, that’s not its mission.

    BTW, we do give people fora to respond to stories about them after they run. In addition to letters to the editor and op-eds in the newspaper, we have the Blowback section online. It would clearly be better if we enabled people to comment and discuss stories online on the same web page as the stories themselves, and we’re on our way there. So yes, what Google’s doing is a prod for us to come up with a better mechanism online. All criticism on that front is accepted.

    One last point: the criticism of journalists’ listening skills (and those of the organizations they work for) is apt. But Google’s new feature isn’t just about that. It’s also about giving newsmakers a route around skeptical ears. We in this biz get it from both ends, remember; we’re stenographers *and* deaf. But sometimes, we’re also capable of recognizing when someone is lying, spinning, dodging or obfuscating.

    I’m not arguing that less information is better than more information. I’m just saying it’s good for readers to understand what they’re looking at and how it got there.

    All this is all the more reason why news organizations should enable comment and response at their own sites, on their own stories. And how will we deal with Healey’s fear about reporters not being there to provide facts, counterbalance, and perspective? That’s easy: The reporters should be part of that conversation. When challenged, they should come back with more facts. When wrong, of course, they should say so. And we ought to be able to subscribe to that ongoing discussion and the reporting around it. I do agree with the critics who say that newspapers without comments on stories should be ashamed that GoogleNews beat them to it.

  • Just kidding?

    4 comments on Just kidding?
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    Far be it from me to defend LA Times editorialists, but I think some critics are missing the attempted irony in their excoriated opinion piece about Google and newspapers — specifically, the new GoogleNews program that enables the subjects of news stories to respond. Robert Niles at the Online Journalism Review lead the lynch mob, performing a vigorous fisking of the Times.

    The Times wrote: “Many publishers consider the Internet, and Google in particular, a greater threat to their livelihoods than Osama bin Laden.” And Niles harrumphed in reply: “The Los Angeles Times this morning insulted its readers in a stunning editorial that compared Google with Osama bin Laden and showed why Times editors simply do not understand the medium that is growing to dominate the news publishing industry.”

    When I read about this kerfufflement elsewhere, I assumed — as you probably would — that I’d agree with Niles. But reading the Times piece, I think that bin Laden line was so over the top it was intended to mock Luddite ink-stained wretches and distance the wise, newfangled Times from those old fools (including, it would seem, their new owner, Sam Zell, who, the editorial reminds us, “once famously asked, ‘If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?’ “).

    In the end, I read the Times editorial as a defense of Google against frequent charges that it is competitive with newspapers.

    The Times acknowledges, albeit without enthusiasm, that this new Google feature may expose news stories’ mistakes: “News organizations have their flaws, and the added comments on Google may demonstrate that.” Indeed. But then they go on to argue that journalism is about asking questions and these sources’ comments will go up not as a result of questions and without questioning in response and so this isn’t journalism.

    The Times dismisses Google’s new feature and thus says that Google isn’t competition. I would certainly agree with that. Many of those aforementioned Luddite newspaper publishers who fear Google more than bin Laden would disagree. But I say Google is the new newsstand. It is a way to be found and read. It is a reporting tool. It is a presentation tool (with maps and such). It is now a means of continuing the journalistic process by getting response and with it more viewpoints and facts. Google could also be your ad sales force. Oh, there’s much to fret about Google’s power. But as journalistic competition? No, it’s not trying to compete. And I think that was where the Times was trying to get, if by an odd detour. I think.

    Now having said all that, I agree with many of Niles’ criticisms — especially of “stenographic journalism” — and I’d say that the editorial was clumsy at best. Irony — if that is, indeed their intent — is hard, especially in L.A.

    But more important — and here’s where I vigorously agree with Niles — the editorial was the wrong response to the Google feature. The proper answer from the Times — and every other newspaper in the country — should have been: “Me, too. Good idea, Google. News source, you don’t have to go to Google to respond to, correct, clarify, or augment articles. You can do it right here at our newspaper.com. We don’t just welcome this new opportunity to listen better and get more perspectives and facts. We will beg you to do it. Because it will improve jouranlism.” That is what the Times should have said.

    And that’s in essence what Dave Winer is suggesting when he again proposes that newspapers should host the blogs of everyone they quote. I don’t know that I’d want to be hosted by a bunch of newspapers. But I would want them to open up the right of response there and I would want them to link to my own blog (a process we are starting to see in places such as the Washington Post). That’s what the Times should be doing with its editorial: linking to Niles and Winer and me and encouraging the discussion to continue. That is the real lesson Google is teaching.