Cherry picking advertising and not paying for the journalism
By Tom Foremski - May 17, 2006
Google can sell advertising for much less because it doesn't have to pay for any journalism. Newspapers, TV and radio sell advertising so that they can pay for the journalism.
Craigslist can operate a global classified ads business with just 18 people and do it on a shoestring because Craigslist isn't paying for journalism. It can cherry pick the classified ads business from newspapers and do it insanely cheaply because it doesn't have to pay for the journalism.
So who will pay for the journalism?
Google News cherry picks the best of 4,500 global news sources and it doesn't even want to monetize the business. Therefore there is no way in hell that other media companies can compete against that--because they have much higher costs--and the largest cost is paying for the journalism.
So who will pay for the journalism? You might ask why do we need a professional media class, when we could empower a citizens army of amateur journalists, as some are trying to do.
The reason we need a professional media class is because amateurs do an amateurish job. And that is bad because our society, our economy, depends on high quality information.
In the IT industry, all software engineers know GIGO. This stands for garbage in, garbage out. It refers to the quality of the data that a software program processes. If the data is corrupted in some way, or the source is unreliable, then the end result will also be the same.
We need high quality media in abundant quantities so that we aren't harmed by GIGO.
Professional journalism is a vital pillar of our society, it is sometimes called the Fourth Estate, right up there alongside the Church, Government and the People. Yet professional journalism is fast disappearing because the business models that supported it are disappearing.
I've been asking for more than a year, "what happens if the old media dies before the new media learns to walk?" Media is how society "thinks" it is how we figure out solutions to important problems.
And we have some very big problems ahead that demand the best, high quality information. There is Bird Flu, there are huge political issues to deal with, there are enormous ecological challenges ahead.
Yet we have a sick media sector that is getting worse.
So who will pay for the journalism? Last week Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO seemed irritated in answering the question "when will you monetize Google news?"
But this is an incredibly important question because if Google was determined to monetize Google news, then it would associate some value to the content. Then the content producers could charge Google and any others, and funnel back the money to produce high quality news media.
That would be a virtuous cycle and Google News would be supporting an extremely important and extremely vital resource that is a pillar of a healthy society: high quality professional journalism.
Instead, it cherry picks the best and refuses to try to monetize the news it copies, which compounds the problem because it associates no value to it. Yet our society, our businesses, associate a tremendous amount of value to high quality journalism.
Google is inadvertently blocking the ability of news organisations to monetize their work. That harms our ability as a society, and as an economy, to make the best decisions.
We need to have a vibrant professional media, competing to produce the best, high quality news media. Because then we are likely to make the best decisions, and choose the best future.
I'm hoping Google will recognize that "Don't be evil" means nothing and that "Do some good" is what Google founders and employees would rather be doing (that's probably what the Founders meant so say).
Google has a chance to do some good on a massive scale. And Googlers love big challenges; the Gordian Knot of this next phase of the Internet is how to pay for the journalism we need. Google could become the saviour of the Fourth Estate rather than one of its pall bearers.
- - -
[Published in an experimental format across different sites, the first part is here, the second part is here.]
By Tom Foremski - May 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comment
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Comments (6)
I have been thinking about this a lot and reading a very good book by Stephen Mitchell -- The History of News. One of the interesting insights is that the thing you are calling "old media" is very new -- sure, it has been around for most of the industrial age. But the media was a very different animal in pre-industrial times (that is, for most of human history).
In terms of answering your number one question, who will pay for journalism, (and I assume we are talking about poitical journalism, not entertainment) before we had an "independent" and "objective" media we had partisans paying for journalism. Economic partisans that paid to find out things important to their businesses (did the spice ship sink on the way back from India?) and political partisans that paid to influence perceptions and thus events.
Having grown up with a free, independent, objective media I have come to assume that this is valuable and important to upholding our democracy. But my experience of the media's inability to challenge the current administration in Washington points to the flaw in that thinking. Perhaps a more partisan press would actually be a benefit to society.
And whether we like it or not, with the demise of mass advertising, it looks like we will see the demise of mass media, and with it the economic motivation to produce an "objective" news product. We may come to expect news in the future to be subsidized by those that have an opinion they wish to present.
Posted: May 17, 2006 5:58 AM
Ted: good point. Dunno if that new (old) ideal will replace the current, but I think we'll at least see more of that.
Tom, I'd like to see good journalism paid for too, but why is the failure to monitize the fault of 11th place Google News? See these numbers:
http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/003447.php
If you need to blame something new (rather than the media execs), blame the Internet as a whole.
[My second attempt leaving this comment. Your blog software needs some attention!]
Posted: May 17, 2006 12:51 PM
Ted: Interesting point. Do we go back to a patronage type of journalism? In a way, my push to gain sponsors is that type of model. But it is not one that can be applied broadly. Businesses need high quality information to make decisions, does that become a private industry, where the market analysts supply private reports? That's something we see. And as for the established press not having the cojones to challenge the administration, that's true but there is plenty around that does challenge the establishment in the alternate press and on Comedy Central with the Daily News and Stephen Colbert!
Posted: May 17, 2006 4:42 PM
Gabe: Sorry for the comments problem, my Geek skills are getting better, but it is a problem with this "standalone journalism" situation (which is BS in a collaborative world).
I'm not saying it is all Google's fault but I'm using Google as an example, because it is the most visible and most powerful entity in the online world. The criticisms apply to Yahoo and many, many others that are following the same model. Also, I want to challenge Google to figure out the solution to what I believe is the most important problem of this next phase of the Internet...
Posted: May 17, 2006 4:48 PM
You are so right so often, Tom, but as a reporter who is a computer programmer in his spare time, allow me to say you could not be more wrong on this issue.
Surely you are not alone. Journalists have begun grousing that Craig Newmark and Eric Schmidt are somehow unfairly extracting value from others.
What Google News does is cherry harvesting, not cherry picking. It takes much *hard work* and money to come up with the algorithms, code and web of hardware needed to drive a fast, excellent aggregator like Google News.
That hard work is no less sweat equity than the hard work that goes into collecting news. I wonder if it often occurs to us journallists that people in the community have long viewed us as "cherry pickers" as well -- we cherry pick readily available information, present it a consumer-friendly format, and charge exorbitant prices for the privilege of advertising beside it.
Any reporter will scoff at the notion that the information he collects is "readily available." Well, now you know how Craig and Eric feel.
If Google News is such a trivial, easy way to extract value from newspapers, then why didn't cash-rich newspaper publishers create the same thing years ago? Why don't they do so now?
If anything, Google News should extract extra premium for its work, because the skills needed to code that site are, I believe, still more rare than the skills needed to cover a city council meeting (and I know just how grueling the latter can be) or finagle information about a business deal from a source.
Posted: May 18, 2006 11:27 AM
Ryan, you are right, coding the algorithms is hard, and it really is "rocket science." However, the amount of sweat labor that goes into the coding is *not* equivalent to the sweat labor that goes into producing the content for the daily Google News. It is a tiny, tiny fraction of the sweat labor that goes into news production every day, at all the 4500+ sources that are scraped.
There are more than 100 news aggregators out there, all using sophisticated algorithms--but there is *no* algorithm to produce news, only to copy it.
That is not a fair relationship, imho.
Posted: May 18, 2006 1:12 PM