Google's Plan To Save the News Through Reinvention

eldavojohn writes "It's no secret that Google doesn't create content, but rather helps people find it. And Google News is no different. So what does the company plan to do about complaints from the news industry that profits are dropping drastically? In a lengthy and comprehensive article, The Atlantic diagnoses the problem and looks at Google's plan to 'save' the symbiotic organism it is attached to, which older generations have traditionally branded 'the news.' The answer, of course, hinges on moving news from dead tree print to the information age via Google's many projects: Living Stories, Fast Flip, and YouTube Direct. But Google is also exploring the more traditional options of displaying ads and designing a paywall so users can easily migrate back to subscriptions like the newspapers of yore. You may also recall that last week the Internet was abuzz with the idiocy of suggestions the FTC had aggregated from inside the industry. Ars brings mention of other proposed plans, both good and bad, from the FTC's report on ideas that newspaper companies are kicking around."

Comments

Newspapers need to team up with someone else...

[garcia]

From the article:

One Google employee who asked not to be named mentioned another report on journalism's future and pointed out a section called "Focus on the User." "They just mean, 'Get money out of the user,'" he said. "Nowhere do they talk about how to create something people actually want to read and engage with and use." On the topic of engaging modern users, Google feels very confident right now, and the news business feels very nervous. Apart from anything else, that certainty gap makes Google important to the future of the news.

So far I am completely unimpressed with Google's attempts at engaging the modern user. I use a lot of Google's products but none of them are really "engaging". Yeah, they're trying different engagement tactics such as copycatting the "like" feature and adding social commenting to Google Reader. They've tried and failed to engage people with Wave and Buzz. They have some input on Google News from "pros". Otherwise, it's just your typical aggregator. Not impressed.

Now, the whole getting money out of the user thing is all the newspaper industry cares about. While some are coming around to the fact that community is what is most important, right now at least, to their bottom line they are so far behind the curve that they may never catch up. Blogs are great not only for the content they aggregate or create themselves and deliver for free, but the commenting that's permitted, encouraged and which flourishes far better than on any newspaper site.

Once Google stops concerning itself with pandering to the pay-for desires of the other industries, perhaps the lessons and wars waged and won on the blogs will make themselves known to others. Until then the newspaper industry, even with Google backing them in some sort of lame attempt at winning a war they lost 10 years ago, will continue its slow death.

Re:Newspapers need to team up with someone else...

[girlintraining]

WD-40, known as "Water Displacement 40"... took years of development before it was perfected. The lightbulb, which took over a hundred years of researching thousands of filament materials before finding a good one. Duct tape, which started out as a way to seal ammo boxes during WWII somehow wound up finding its way into just about every major engineering undertaking in modern history, fashion, and a lot more.

These are just one of the many technologies we now take for granted, and it was made possible by a combination of luck, research, and people finding applications for it that the designers hadn't intended. Google is an incubator of technologies -- they try a hundred different things to find one that works.

There will always be a need for people to know what's going on in the world... And someone needs to produce that information, and then it needs to be packaged in a way that can be easily and quickly understood. People who want reliable information in a easy to use format will pay for it -- like intelligence agencies. People who don't need reliable information (which is most of us, most of the time) probably won't pay. Google is for the latter group.

I'm allergic to kool aid! You can have mine!

[gd23ka]

The one reason people don't turn on the news anymore is because they can see
the huge disparity between reality and the useless propaganda thrown into their
faces - in between a bunch of commercials for diabetes drugs and anti-depressants
and anybody who hasn't seen the scooter guy with that scooter you can get on
Medicaid when the junk food and prescription drugs have worn you down to the point
you can't walk anymore.

Wrapping this pile of crap into a new Google News Fajita with extra kool-aid?
Not going to work.

Let me quote Zbigniew Brzezinski one of the globalist go-fers:

"For the first time in all of human history mankind is politically awakened - that's a total new reality - it has not been so for most of human history.""

Re:Google Shouldn't

[rtb61]

The truth is the old news model is dead. Years ago I used to get my news from the same three sources with only slight channel variation, the local newspaper, the local radio station and TV news. That is now gone forever. I have very little interest in only getting my news via those locked in sources any more.

Generally I prefer to get the news from localised sources for international news, or news sources that align more closely with my interests at the time, or emailed updates from reputable sources, or even random stumbles. When it comes to getting more detail I much prefer to get a blog from a semi-professional journalists who is focusing in on a particular story.

I very rarely go to a news site to read general news to see what is going on, in fact I haven't done it for years. Emailed news alerts, email news subscription and news as part of a internet portal are the becoming becoming the norm for access to the news.

Oddly enough my only news lock in is a news lock out, an anti subscription to anything News Corp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_Corporation and Fox News, they would have to be one most corrupted multinational news source in the world and I specifically avoid them.

Re:Adwords it

[hitmark]

or run a blog with a cut from google each time their article shows up on news.google.com when a ad gets clicked.