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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."
That will piss off these fuckers.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Every article gets an Adword block, Google takes a smaller cut than usual, and the newspaper gets paid.
Shortly after that, the better independent writers will probably start publishing to Google directly.
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.
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.""
Turn college students into journalists. "If the nation’s 200,000 journalism and mass communications students spent 10 percent of their time doing actual journalism," said one participant, "that would more than make up for all the traditional media jobs that have been lost in the past 10 years."
You unintentionally stumbled upon a nice parallel there. Like the communications major looking for a nice engineer to marry, print media is out trolling for a sugar daddy.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
The problem is that the people that created the problem are trying to solve it. This rarely works. The system is in flux and will remain so until a clear path is recognized by the consumer. ie I'll pay for NYTIMEs $14/yr but not $14/month. Cable TV is having a similar problem. The consumer wants ale carte but the providers want to maintain the status quo and keep your eyeballs 24/7. Unfortunately it is out of their hands. The market is fragmenting their structure is not sustainable with todays infrastructure providing more choices. Eventually some model will dominate and that will become the new status quo.
Google could help small publishers by paying for the number of impressions on its Adwords platform, rather than by the much smaller number of "clicks" generated by Adwords on small news sites. The article never actually outlines any plan by Google to help save news organization. The unstated "plan" apparently is for Google to buy up all the news organization after they've gone bankrupt.
Doesn't FOX News "reinvent" the news every day?
New slang when you notice the stripes, the dirt in your fries.
He's dead, Jim. But guys like Murdoch are the new Lex Luthor; the newspaper publishers are killing their own businesses and blaming the internet.
When you buy a dead-tree paper, you're paying for the cost of printing; or at least you used to. The rest is paid by advertisers, and some papers even give printed versions away for free. But the real reason newspapers are dying is because publishers are charging too damned much for them! When I was a kid, the St Louis Post Dispatch, a big city reputable paper, cost a dime. With the advances in printing technology you'd think it would'nt have gone up at much or even at all, but it's a buck now.
And a world-wide readership should bring in MORE ad money than a local readership. "Ad blockers" they scream? Well, people don't block ads because they hate advertising, they block ads because they hate intrusive advertising.
Someone with more brains and less greed could certainly make money in the newspaper business. They're killing themselves with their own greed.
Free Martian Whores!
I had an awesome deal to receive a pretty well respected newspaper for only a dollar a month. This included daily papers and the big awesome paper on Sundays. I planned on having a grand ROI by utilizing the coupons which far exceeded the cost of subscription (not because I needed it, but because I have a sick, OCD financial mind). Anyways, fast forward a few months and I could not keep up with throwing these things out. Every morning I would kick the paper inside my door, and everytime I took trash out, I would take them to the recycling bin. After a while though, I had BOXES of newspaper all around my door. It was a MOUND of papers overflowing in several boxes. I did not open or read a single one of them. I meant to cancel, but it was one of those things that you just forget about and it was only a dollar so it was put on the back burner. Eventually, I DID cancel and guess what? THEY KEPT COMING. I called and complaint to take care of it, but it was almost to the point where I wanted to tell them that I would pay to have them stop being delivered. Which brings me to my idea of reverse subscription. Spam everyone with free papers daily. Advertise that you will stop bringing them for a monthly fee.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
Its pretty obvious that creation and distribution of news is becoming decentralized. Now that the average person can make a reputable blog in minutes (assuming that what they have to say is worthwhile) there is no need for megacorps to push a very expensive distribution model involving dead trees and armies of journalists. Average people are the journalists of tomorrow and thank the Holy Noodle Monster for that considering the recent decline in journalistic integrity. People can use Google or other tools to quickly find what they are interested in even though there is a huge amount of material, and they can read it on their phones on the go or at their computer in the comfort of their home. You can compare sources to others around the world, instantly, and see where biases lay (lie? damn English!). You can have dialogs with people of all walks of life about any given article. There is no way for dead-tree news to beat this, and there is no way consumers will be willing to pay subscriptions for generic news on the internet, so to all the paper- or subscription-based news companies out there, I bid you farewell with a smug smile on my face. ;)
The middle man age is ending, mainly due to the Internet, and the leeches are screaming as we burn them off their food source. This applies to the music industry and probably to TV and Hollywood next as independent YouTube production is beginning to flourish. Long live the Internet, the all-purpose tool of the people and the bane of the oppressor. Don't ever let them take it from us.
There, fixed that for you.
I wouldn't be happy if either traditional news sources or news from the web went away. They are both needed to balance out each others shortcomings.
Web sources of the news has forced mainstream media to cover stories that otherwise would have been buried.
Mainstream media provides a base of credibility against the web where anyone can write anything.
Then let me tell you why the news industry lost me. It wasn't paywalls. It wasn't paper or plastic or bits.
It was:
I would honestly rather read some resourceful person's blog where they have gone to the trouble to find interesting, reasonable resolution images; linked to supporting information for their factual claims; and don't try to put in crazy "alternative" ideas like the idiocy of creationism, scientifically unsubstantiated claims of vaccine/autism, cellphone/cancer, angels, auras, and so on down the line of malarkey, and where I may comment upon the subject matter, provoking others to respond, which in turn often digs up more information, etc.
To watch Fox News is to watch the poster child for the failure of an entire industry. To watch CNN is to listen to Kindergarten level expositions on celebrity hi-jinks when wars are raging. The web sites these companies have created are true lowest-common-denominator designs that are painful to anyone who can think their way out of a paper bag. If you're going to aim your content at only half the country, maybe you should be aiming at the half that can think. Or is that too frightening?
And the news industry wonders why its income has dropped. Sheesh.
PS: Spell check and grammar check too... maybe an intern could do that while you FACT CHECK and EDIT OUT YOUR OPINION!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.