When Google Wave was announced, I got all jittery-happy about the possibilities it presented for news. Now, from a Belgian site, via a German site, I find a video interview with Wave’s project manager, Stephanie Hannon, speculating about its use in news:
Journalism is a business – that is how it is going to sustain itself; that is a key precept of the New Business Models for News Project. But is it still an industry dominated by companies and employment?
In the first part of his analysis of the news business, BusinessWeek chief economist Michael Mandel equates bad news about news with the number of journalists employed. He charts newspaper jobs falling from more than 450,000 in 1990 to fewer than 300,000 today and calls that depressing – which it is, if one of those lost jobs is yours. But it could also signal new efficiency and productivity, no? Looking at these numbers with the cold eye of an economist whose magazine and job aren’t on the block, perhaps it is nothing more than the path of an industry in restructuring. Perhaps it’s actually a signal of opportunity. Indeed, Mandel then laid that chart atop one for the loss of jobs in manufacturing and found them sinking in parallel, with newspapers just a bit ahead on the downward slope today. “Not good news, by any means,” he decreed.
But there is the nub of a much bigger trend: the fall news as an industry paralleling the end of the industrial economy. That’s not just about shedding the means of production and distribution now that they are cost burdens rather than barriers to entry. It’s about the decentralization of journalism as an industrial complex, about news no longer being based solely on employment.
A few months ago, I quibbled with Mandel’s BW cover story arguing that America has experienced an “innovation shortfall.” There, as here, I think he’s measuring the wrong economy: the old, centralized, big economy. In both cases, he misses new value elsewhere in the small economy of entrepreneurs and the noneconomy of volunteers.
I return again to the NewBizNews Project, where we modeled a sustainable economy of news at between 10-15% of a metro paper’s revenue – about as much as any of them bring online – with an equivalent amount of editorial staffing but those people are no longer all sitting under one roof; they work in – and oftentimes own – more than 100 separate enterprises. I return, too, to the Wikimedia Foundation calculating the value of time spent on edits alone with it adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars.
In both cases, tremendous value is created at tremendous efficiency outside of the company and in great measure outside of employment.
So is employment the measure of news? No. Is it the proper measure for every industry? Not necessarily. Is it the measure of the economy? Not as much as it used to be. Media is becoming the first major post-industry. Others will follow. You just have to know where to look.
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It’s one matter when new value is created outside old companies in industries such as retail – in WWGD?, I cited $59.4 billion in sales from 547,000 merchants on eBay in 2007 vs. $26.3 billion in 853 Macy’s stores – but another matter when the employment is replaced in industries built around priesthoods: journalism, education, even government and medicine. Then not just economics but behaviors change.
The latest edition of the Guardian MediaTalkUSA podcast, which I present, features the work of CUNY’s New Business Models for News Project and discussion with two folks who know hyperlocal: Deb Galant, founder of Baristanet, whom I crowned the queen of hyperlocal; and Jim Willse, editor of the Star-Ledger (who begins the podcast confessing that he began his day reading papers … online).
What’s fascinating is that Galant and Willse extend the idea of local networks.
* Galant wished for a local associated press that would enable news organizations and local blogs to share content and distribute each other.
* Galant at first resisted the idea of ad networks because, to date, they devalue sites and she’s already getting national and regional ads – but then, when asked whether she’d want a piece of advertising that would be up for grabs if a metro paper dies, she relented. The problem is that we need a new word and reputation for networks.
* Willse proposed a co-op apartment model in which the members of the ecosystem/network (call it what you will) engage others – a super – to perform mutual tasks (that’s the role of the framework in our NewBizNews models; it’s what Mark Potts’ Growthspur hopes to provide as a service).
* Galant and Willse also liked the idea of collaborating on journalism, doing more as a group than any of its members could do alone. That’ll be the subject of their next lunch.
It is gratifying to see these people who work in the heart of local adopting and extending some of the ideas we discussed at the Aspen Institute.
By the way, we will hold another meeting in New York to discuss the models, sometime in early November (as soon as I’m sure I’ll be back in full fettle). In the meantime, please take a listen:
Google has an image problem – not a PR problem (that is, not with the public) but a press problem (with whining old media people). Google is trying hard – too hard, perhaps – not to argue with the guys who still buy ink by the barrel. Google is only causing them to buy fewer barrels. And newspaper people will use their last drops of ink to complain about Google’s success and try to blame it for their own failures rather than changing their own businesses.
What should Google do? I think it needs to become news’ best friend.
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This week, I called The New York Times on internet bigotry. Now I’ll call the French media on a subset: Google bigotry.
Last night, I got email from a Le Monde journalist who said, “I’m on the way to write an article about Google facing a rising tide of discontent concerning privacy and monopoly.” She went on to wonder whether these critics would move to Bing and, at the same time, whether Google would become the next Microsoft with a negative image and government pressure (aren’t those two questions inherently contradictory?).
I wanted to know if it was possible for you to respond to my questions?
I threw out my glass of Bordeaux (it had turned) and poured a nice American cabernet and then responded:
There’s one problem: I do not buy the premise of your story. I’ve seen this story again and again, especially from France. I’m not sure what it is the French have against Google, but it’s some form of national insanity, I think. Most French publishers rejected my book, What Would Google Do?, because they said they wanted a diatribe against Google – that, it appears, is the French reflex. Only after I blogged that did my brave publisher come forward and publish it as La méthode Google.
Do some people complain about Google? Yes, it is often the same people who complain about the internet and about change and technology and simply use Google as their target simply because it is so big and so innovative.
Google is the fastest growing company in the history of the world, according to the Times of London. It is the No. 1 brand for three years running, which means that people not only know but admire it.
So who are these people who you say are part of this “rising tide of discontent” about Google? How do you measure it? How big is the tide?
How big was it? What is its impact? I don’t see it. I see journalists doing this story because they want to.
Google is not a monopoly. It is a competitive company and it took advertising dollars for one simple reason: because advertisers found a better deal there – buying performance, not scarcity, with Google sharing their risk – than they ever found in our old media. It is media companies’ fault that they lost their customers after cheating them for too many years.
Privacy? That is an overused word. The issue is not privacy, as I say in my book. It is control. You should also look at the benefits of publicness, which come when we share things about ourselves and find others like us. If you have problems with privacy then you have problems with every member of Facebook and its clones across the world and the entire generation that made social sites huge.
With all respect, it appears to me that you have already drawn your conclusions and written your story – that there is this “rising tide” you see against Google, that is a “monopoly,” that people are leaving for Bing (introduce me to some, would you?), that it now has a “negative image.”
I don’t see it.
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Last week, I got an email from an Israeli journalist, which said: “These days we are working on an article about Google, focusing on the company’s failures rather than on its well known successes.”
Another reporter decides what to say before doing the reporting. Oh, it’s hardly uncommon. But I decided not to bother with this. I’ve done it too often: arguing with a reporter’s premise and then not appearing in the story because I dared to disagree.
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This week, a Google PR person I met at the Aspen Institute sent me links to a public exchange in editorials in the Seattle Times. It started with an editorial lambasting Google, using Italian newspapers complaints as its peg: “Google is a wonderful thing. It is also a dangerous thing, as it keeps demonstrating in its quietly rapacious way.”
But they got their facts wrong. They said that if a paper didn’t want to be in Google News, it couldn’t be in search. All they had to do was a little research – otherwise known as reporting or fact-checking – to find out that was false. They also suggested that the government should go after Google under the Sherman Antitrust Act. A Google attorney sent a response explaining the law and business to them:
Your Aug. 30 editorial [“Rapacious? Google it,” Opinion] seems to misunderstand both competition law and how Google News works.
Under the antitrust laws, there’s no problem with a company becoming successful, so long as it earns it fair and square. The problem is when companies act illegally to maintain their market position — by foreclosing competition or making it difficult for users to switch. No one has seriously suggested that Google’s success is due to anything other than hard work and constant improvement.
Your editorial also wrongly suggests that news organizations can’t withdraw their content from Google News without also removing it from all Google searches. That’s false. Publishers are in complete control over where and whether their content appears.
News organizations can use a universally honored technical standard called “robots.txt” to block their content from being indexed by Google and other search engines. And if they want to be removed only from Google News, they can just tell us directly, and we’ll remove them.
Still, of more than 25,000 news sources, only a handful have chosen to be removed. Why? Because Google News sends news organizations more than a billion clicks each month, which they can use to win loyal readers and generate more advertising revenue.
The Times wasn’t at all embarrassed about being so wrong and came back against Google again. Just because they wanted to. Just because they felt like it. Just because they need an enemy to blame for their own failing business.
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Google is far from perfect. It ain’t God. In my book, I complained about its opaqueness while demanding transparency from the rest of us and about its policies in China. There’s plenty to criticize.
But these media people are going after Google’s success for no good reason other than their own jealousy. It’s not just that they dislike the competition – and they do, for it is a new experience for too many of them. If they were smart, they’d use Google to get more audience and make more money but they don’t know how to (or rather, they’d prefer not to change). No, the problem is that Google represents change and a new world they’ve refused to understand.
What should Google do?
I’m not sure but I’d start by using Google’s platform to enable the new ecosystem of news, the entrepreneurs who will build the future of journalism – and that could include the incumbents, if they have any sense. That framework could include promotion (via GoogleNews and more), revenue (via Google advertising), technology (publishing, content, and measurement tools), consultation and education (on maximizing attention, on using new tools), and R&D (Google Wave for news, the hyperpersonal news stream….).
Google should position itself as the friend of news and then maybe it won’t matter if it is newspapers’ friend; they’ll just come off as the whiners they are.
: LATER: Google News published a video explaining some of what goes into its scraping and ranking and how to improve your chances of getting good links. It’s a first step:
Note that Google News is now trying to understand, through others’ citations, which publications are first or early on a story so it can link more effectively to news at its source.
I was growling at my iPhone on the train this morning as I read a prominently promoted New York Times story about the rumored Chelsea Clinton wedding that didn’t happen. Sixth graph:
The persistence of the rumor despite the lack of tangible evidence says something about today’s free-for-all Internet media culture, where facts sometimes don’t get in the way of a good story. It also says something about the Clintons and the mistrust they have engendered over the years that so many people do not take them at their word, even over a question like this.
It’s bad enough that the reporter, Peter Baker, made two such gross generalizations but it’s worse that there was no backup for either in the story.
Who spread the rumor according to Mr. Baker? Here’s every attribution in his story:
* “The wedding rumor mill got started by the Boston Globe…”
* “Then New York magazine picked up the ball…”
* “In July, the New York Daily News said…”
* “’There is no truth to that,’ Mrs. Clinton said on Fox News…”
* “The Washington Post reported…”
* “The Post followed up…”
* “On Sunday, the New York Post reported…”
* “The New York Post concluded…”
I don’t see a damned thing about “internet media culture” there, do you? Not one snarky, unreliable, rumor-mongering, content-stealing, value-sucking blog. Nope, not one mention of Gawker. Just big, old newspapers and magazines. Indeed, the only refutation of the rumor – the fact-checking of it – appears to have been on Fox News. (I also saw no editor asked whether they continued to spread the rumor because they didn’t trust the Clintons.)
This is the sort of internet bigotry that pops up in The Times like clockwork.
Mind you, The Times as a whole is doing lots of innovative things online: The Local (in which CUNY is involved), its blogs, its twittering, its API – plenty to praise.
Yet this snarling about the internet still bubbles up from the newsroom, from reporters and from the many editors who choose to publish it. That’s the newsroom culture – as opposed to that damned internet media culture – you keep hearing about as an impediment to change. This is how newsrooms fight it, using the one weapon they have: the keyboard. They may be forced to blog and podcast but they can always get their revenge in print. Good, old, comforting – though unsubstantiated, rumor-mongering, never-let-the-facts-stand-in-the-way-of-a-good-story – print.