All Posts Tagged With: "google"

This month’s “Carnival of Journalism” asked the question: “What does Google+ mean for journalists, today and tomorrow?” Of course, I don’t have all the answers; I’m not sure yet that I have one really good answer. Google+, Google’s first serious threat to Facebook in the social-media space, is so new that we’re all grappling with how to best leverage it.

(I have to laugh when I visit the Google+ Welcome page, which still mentions that the service is in “Field Trial” mode. With 25 million users for Google+, and still growing quickly, few companies would continue to call this a field trial — but Google is no ordinary company.)

Since plenty has been written about how journalists are discovering uses for Google+, I’ll pass on retrodding that ground. Here’s my alternate message:

• If you’re a journalist, you SHOULD be using Google+.
• If you’re a journalism professor or instructor, you MUST be using Google+.

Yeah, that’s easy for me to say. My career in large part is about identifying and leveraging emerging technologies that are relevant to journalism, testing them, experimenting, and conducting research. I enjoy checking out all the new digital stuff that our technology friends unleash on the world, and figuring out what’s useful and relevant to our profession — what will advance storytelling, reporting techniques, community, and news business models — and what’s not.

Many a journalist and many a journalism professor will recoil at the thought of trying out yet another social-media service. They want to do or teach journalism, not add on to what already may seem like social-media overload. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube, Flickr, Digg… — and now Google+! Can’t we just stop already and stick to the basics of producing and teaching good journalism?!

I’m sympathetic to that sentiment, but only to a degree. For many upstart online, mobile, and social-media services that appear to be useful journalistic tools but have not yet caught much traction, fine, leave it to people like me to figure out if they’re of use to the profession.

Take VYou.com, a social-based video Q&A and audience interaction service that I’m very fond of. I think VYou has tremendous potential to be useful to journalists, and I encourage people to use it. At the University of Colorado Boulder, where I’m the program director for the Digital News Test Kitchen, I’ve convinced some of our faculty, researchers, and student journalists to experiment with VYou.com.

But I will not go so far as to suggest that you are a bad journalist or an incompetent journalism professor because you’re not willing to give VYou a chance and try it out. As much as I like VYou and the online and mobile interaction model it represents, the service has yet to prove itself.

Google+ is different. Google has tried before to get it right with a social-media service. Buzz, it is pretty well acknowledged, was a flop. Okrut, Google’s first foray into social media, got popular outside the U.S., but never caught on in Google’s home country. The company seems to have learned some important lessons and has incorporated them into Google+. The reviews for Google+ have been mostly positive — actually, very positive. (Count me as enthusiastic about Google+; I’m likely to be a loyal user, just as with Facebook.) Rapid growth to 25 million users in a matter of weeks since launch of the “field trial” should tell you that Google+ is a compelling social-media experience which poses the most serious threat to Facebook of anything else out there.

For that reason, I can take the view — certain to be unpopular among many journalists who are weary of keeping up with the latest digital-media developments — that journalists have got to become familiar with Google+, just as they must be familiar with and use Facebook and Twitter.

I mean, c’mon, tens and hundreds of million people are using those services, and they’re getting news from them! If you expect to remain a working journalist, you really have no choice but to understand the impact that Facebook, Twitter, and now Google+ are having on the news environment. And you can’t understand them unless you use those services.

For those who teach journalism, I will be even more emphatic. If you are teaching tomorrow’s journalists, and you are not up to speed on and using the services with hundreds of millions of users — social-media services that are profoundly changing the way people get news that’s relevant to them — then you’re doing your students a grave disservice.

Does everyone have to try out and/or use Google+, or Facebook and Twitter? Of course not, and huge parts of the population in the U.S. and other countries will continue to sit out the social-media revolution.

But if you are a journalist working today, or a journalism educator, you have an obligation to use and understand these services. I would hope that few reading these words are not already regular users of Facebook and Twitter. If you’re still holding out on Google+, waiting to see if it’s something worth spending some of your time learning and using, you’re late for the train.

Google+: Just use it, journalists!

Google Fast Flip launched this week as a public Google Labs beta, and I’ve been surprised at some of the skepticism about it. The main complaint is that it takes a step backward by displaying screen captures of popular articles from a selection of media websites and makes them the entry point to finding the best content on media sites. The idea and design seem a bit old-school to some critics.

I like Fast Flip a lot, for several reasons:

1. It’s an “alternative Google News” for those not wanting to be overwhelmed with selecting from thousands of media sources.
2. It’s a more comfortable interface for some people, especially, I would guess, older online users who are still most at ease with print-like design than with lists of headline links to choose from.
3. It’s not a replacement for Google News, but an alternative for those looking for a different way to find and read the best content from a selected group of quality sources.
4. It’s Google’s first time in sharing with publishers some of the money earned on its own pages. The search giant doesn’t share revenue from links to news websites’ content on Google News, so this is a significant change in policy, even if only experimental — a way for Google to directly support media publishers, including those who complain that Google is eating their lunch by profiting from links to their news.

Frankly, I’m feeling a bit vindicated by Google’s introduction of Fast Flip. Last April, I wrote several blog posts suggesting that it would be in Google’s self-interest to turn Google News into a news search service that shared ad revenue with publishers that are included in Google News:
Google could come to the rescue, but won’t?
How can newspapers help Google?
To Eric Schmidt: What happened to ‘Don’t Be Evil’?

I also sent e-mails in April to Krishna Bharat, Google Distinguished Researcher and creator and leader of Google News, suggesting that revenue-sharing with news publishers would be a good thing for both the news industry and Google (and, thus, society in general as citizens remained well informed by a healthier news sector). I never heard back from Bharat, even though I’d met him in person a few weeks earlier at Stanford University during a fellowship interview.

If you read through the comment threads on the blog items above, you’ll agree that this was not among the most popular ideas I’ve ever floated in my writing over the years. I got lots of pushback, much of it to the tune of: Google is just smarter than media publishers; Google owes the news industry nothing because it’s already giving news sites millions and millions of user visits, but the publishers aren’t smart enough to figure out how to make money from that.

You can read the links above if you care about my original (unpopular) argument, but the crux is that by sharing revenues, Google would prevent angry and scared news publishers from locking down their content online, AND it would make it politically possible to turn on the ad spigot for Google News because it would share some of its new revenues with the creators/publishers of the content it links to.

While Google didn’t follow my suggestion for opening up Google News for revenue sharing with news publishers, it has done so with a few dozen selected media companies that are taking part in Fast Flip. It’s a variation of what I suggested last April to a generally vigorous assault on the idea.

It’d be nice to think that my humble blog had something to do with the Fast Flip revenue-sharing model, but that’s likely wishful thinking. (If it did, perhaps some nice Google executive will share some of that big pile of G-cash with me. Ah, but life doesn’t work that way.)

Anyway, I’m happy to see Google executives decide that it might be in their interests to share some ad revenues with media publishers. Fast Flip will be an experiment we’ll all be watching closely. Perhaps it will lead to a news-industry revenue source that starts to chip away at the News Crisis we find ourselves in.

Hint: It’s the leadership and corporate culture!

Check out this video of Google CEO Eric Schmidt being interviewed for WashingtonPost.com’s “On Leadership” series by Steven Pearlstein:

Wow. I hadn’t heard Schmidt talk about the Google corporate culture before, but watching this video interview made me realize why his company is so successful, and how the newspaper industry might be able to thrive if it adopted a similar networked, bottom-up decision structure.

To amplify that point, today I received a private e-mail from a frustrated interactive leader at a daily newspaper. She complained about her publisher and other top executives ignoring the good ideas for new revenue generators that she and her staff have suggested, and instead deferring to their own judgment and making the decision to move toward charging for news content on their website. In other words, this publisher has hired online/digital experts, and has access to smart web developers at corporate HQ, but chooses to ignore their advice in favor of his own “better judgment,” even though he’s not a digital-media expert.

If you watched the Schmidt video interview above, you’ll know that that couldn’t happen at Google.

The e-mail I mentioned is not the first I’ve received of its ilk. I periodically hear privately from newspaper online managers about their inability to get new ideas and initiatives approved, and their frustration that their expertise is ignored by executives who “know better.”

So I leave with a question: How do we get more newspaper publishers and executives to loosen the reins, and rein in the arrogance? Or do we just have to wait for them to retire or die?

I’ve tried to make the case in the last couple of blog posts that it’s in Google’s interest to share ad revenues with news providers, by opening up Google News fully to advertising and offering a story-clickthrough-based rev-share program for participating publishers tracked by the service. Without throwing a good-sized financial bone at the news folks, putting more ads on Google News (there are very few currently) will create an uproar among news companies and give Google a black eye that will tarnish the company’s golden reputation.

I haven’t had the chance to meet or interview CEO Eric Schmidt (working on it), but seeing his public speeches I’ve generally had a good feeling about the guy. But after reading New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s column on interviewing Schmidt, “Dinosaur at the Gate,” I’m beginning to wonder if he’ll end up with a Bill Gates reputation. (That’s Gates the ruthless businessman before he turned to philanthropy.)

Writes Dowd:

“Why can’t Google, which likes to see itself as a ‘Don’t Be Evil’ benevolent force in society, just write us a big check for using our stories, so we can keep checks and balances alive and continue to provide the search engine with our stories? After all, Schmidt acknowledges that a lot of what’s on the Internet is ‘a sewer.’ He told me people don’t come to Google for ‘crap,’ but for what’s ‘useful.’

“He declines to pony up money, noting that newspapers could opt out of giving their content to Google free and adding, ‘We actually like making our own money for obviously good capitalist reasons.’

“He says: ‘The best way to get out of this is to invent a new product. That’s the way Google thinks. Incumbents very seldom invent the future.’”

Dowd didn’t ask the question the way I would have, but many of her commenters on that column got the point right. Wrote one Dowd reader:

“Google should somehow partner with the content providers not out of charity but because they won’t have anything worthwhile to search for in a few years if they don’t fork over some of their profits.”

And another…

“News, analysis, opinions, etc. need to be created on an ongoing basis. If as a consequence of Google not sharing any revenues with newspapers, the latter cannot operate any longer, then in essence Google would have slayed the goose that lay the proverbial golden egg.”

As I’ve said in my last two blog items, it’s in Google shareholders’ interest for the company to share its ad revenues with news providers. (And I don’t mean only newspapers and other big media companies; such a program as I’ve proposed would cover even the tiny new-media start-up news sites that Google News tracks and links to.) Schmidt’s unwillingness to come up with a mutually beneficial sharing strategy is just about to push the best journalism behind pay walls, a panicking-publisher movement that appears unstoppable. That’s not exactly in Google shareholders’ best interest.

So what’s the deal, Mr. Schmidt? Have you deleted Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s “Don’t Be Evil” mantra from the corporate mission statement? Because by not helping maintain a strong press (and this has NOTHING to do with saving newsPAPERS; it’s about saving quality journalism), you’re allowing a once strong watchdog press to lose its fangs.

This isn’t about charity to news companies that didn’t have the smarts to reinvent themselves for the digital media era. It’s about turning one of Google’s assets, Google News, into a profit center that also happens to serve a public good: financially supporting news organizations from big to small.

If Schmidt has his way, as expressed to Dowd, it’s not just dinosaur media like newspapers that will suffer. The news entities being formed today to replace newspapers will have less of a chance of making it, because there’s not enough advertising money to go around (and Google grabs so much of it now).

Schmidt told the Newspaper Association of America recently, “Let me just say precisely: It’s a sewer out there.” So I guess he’s willing to allow pissed-off and scared news executives to put the quality content of theirs that Google News tracks to go behind pay walls and the content universe that Google News tracks to get a bit smellier, rather than come up with a plan that prevents that and helps to reverse a journalism (NOT just a newspaper) crisis.

C’mon, Mr. Schmidt, do the right thing. Don’t be evil. It’s even in your best interest!

(Note: I have specifically suggested that a news-provider revenue-share program be limited to Google News, because it tracks a limited and select number of news providers. Sharing revenues on Google.com web searches that lead people to news sites is more troubling; it could mean that all manner of websites want their cut. Let’s not go there just now.)

What goes around, comes around. … Sometimes when you’re having trouble coming up with a solution to a difficult problem, it helps to turn things upside down and get a new perspective.

I’d like to see the newspaper industry, especially the big metro dailies which are in the most trouble and closest to collapse, look at things differently. Stand on their heads. Ditto for the Associated Press, which has been saber-rattling lately about closing off some of its content, even some headlines and blurbs that most reasonable people would consider to be “fair use.” (See this video exchange on the Charlie Rose show between AP CEO Tom Curley and HuffingtonPost.com’s Arianna Huffington, where Huffington makes a strong case that AP and other saber-rattlers (Walter Isaacson, Rupert Murdoch, et al) are trying to go back to old times of walled gardens for media content, which are destined to fail today.)

So here’s an idea for newspapers, the AP, et al: Think through how you can help Google make more money! Figure out how to spread your content much more widely instead of focusing on how to restrict its flow.

Stop looking to the Recording Industry Association of America’s beyond-belief-stupid approach to the spread of music on the Internet (“Hey, I know! Let’s sue our customers!”) as a role model. Stop pointing the gun at your own head!

There’s a hint of why I say this in my previous blog post about Google’s Google News, the popular news link aggregator. The search giant just recently began dipping its toe in the water in terms of adding contextual ads on searches via Google News, but it’s held back on opening the ad spigot fully. You can guess why: It would cause even more of an uproar among news providers, some of whom would block their content from Google and likely get pushed toward putting price tags on their content (hello, again, walled gardens!).

What the AP and newspaper publishers really want is money from Google (their “fair share”). As the new middleman between the consumer and the news provider, Google is able to handily scoop up so much ad money for its role that there’s not enough left over to support the type of strong news media we’ve been used to. Ergo, newspapers are being cut back in size and quality, journalists are laid off, and investigative reporting can no longer be afforded by the institutions who used to do the bulk of it.

In my last blog item, I urged Google to come up with a revenue-share plan using Google News as a platform and opening the ad spigot. It would benefit itself by turning on another revenue source, and help news publishers by paying them according to the number of clicks through to their content by Google News users. Everybody (not just newspapers, but any website publisher that produces news and is tracked by Google News) wins, and publishers have less reason to saber-rattle and threaten to commit hari-kari by walling off some of their content.

Will Google do this? I’ve used my contact network to try to get the idea in front of Google CEO Eric Schmidt; I know at least that his personal PR rep has it and I hope passed it on. I’ve tried unsuccessfully to reach Krishna Bharat, Google’s chief scientist and the original developer of Google News, but he’s ignored me so far (despite that I met him a few weeks ago at Stanford as he and 4 other people interviewed me for a fellowship). Apparently my powers of influence at mighty Google are nil.

The AP and the newspaper industry (still) have power. How about if instead of threatening Google, the news industry joins forces to approach Google with a plan that would allow it to fully turn on the Google News ad spigot; financially support the entire community of news providers, new and old (this is NOT just about newspapers); and provide a way to improve Google News by establishing new methods for identifying the original sources of news so that they can be put at the top of relevant Google News pages and search results?

Newspapers’ and the AP’s approach to Google cannot be adversarial. It must be designed not only to help the news industry, but to benefit Google’s shareholders!

Yeah, I know, AP’s Curley “says,” as he did on the Charlie Rose interview and elsewhere, that the AP is not targeting Google. (Google is a paying AP customer, after all.) But it’s not difficult to read through the lines.

When I read comments by people like AP Chairman Dean Singleton, who told the Newspaper Association of America recently, “We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,” and press baron Rupert Murdoch say, “Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights? Thanks, but no thanks,” visions of the RIAA ring in my head. Those guys need to stand on their heads and look at the situation from a new perspective.

If they can achieve an intelligent dialog with Google and come up with a plan that benefits both sides, then newspapers can follow Huffington’s advice (of which I concur, 100%), and do everything they can to get their content everywhere possible online. Monetize it not just within your walled garden (website), but on every blog or website that your content appears on.

Newspapers and other old-mindset news providers are panicking. They need money! Now! I think they might find it if they stand on their heads.

I was disappointed in Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote speech to the Newspaper Association of America today. (Audio here, courtesy of Bill Densmore. Transcript of Q&A portion of Schmidt’s session, thanks to Poynter.org.) Oh, it was a fine speech and Schmidt educated some of the backward-thinking publishers in the audience, no doubt, about what’s ahead.

But Schmidt has expressed his respect for newspapers and a desire to help them survive. Well, he’s not promoting newsPAPERS surviving, but rather their large newsrooms of reporters capable of well serving society’s need for watchdogs of the powerful. That’s a role that Google does not want to play. He thinks that newspapers should use the Internet to get 10 times their current audience online and with mobile (cutting back on print), and he thinks that advertising will (eventually) be their salvation.

I was hoping for more from Schmidt. With a few instructions to his managers, he could direct billions of dollars to content producers, including news organizations. I don’t get why he doesn’t do it.

Why should Daddy Googlebucks help those newspaper publishers who are too behind the times to understand how to survive in our new world? Well, first, I want Google to support quality news content, which may come from a newspaper company, a news-oriented start-up, or a quality blogger who produces news. So I’m not talking about Google saving just newspapers, but rather about the company financially supporting quality content and journalism.

Right now legacy news executives are panicking, especially newspapers. They’re discussing schemes to put news content behind walls, away from Google’s prying eyes, and despite many rational and convincing arguments as to why that is a DUMB idea except in special cases, the movement appears to be gaining speed. (As to why it’s dumb, I urge you to read this great piece by search guru (and ex-newspaperman) Danny Sullivan, “Google’s Love For Newspapers & How Little They Appreciate It,” and Steve Yelvington’s month-old advice, “Eight barriers to local paid content.”)

If news executives continue down this misguided path, this loss of quality content will not be good for Google (nor the public). Sure, if a bunch of newspapers led by dinosaur executives cut off their noses to spite their faces, new news entities will arise and journalism will live on after a short period of ugly transition where the watchdogs are few and the bad guys in government and business get away with more than usual. It can’t be in Google’s interest to let this happen, and the quality of the web content it thrives on wither, even if only for a year or two.

What can Google do? What order do I wish Schmidt would issue to the Google troops from his lofty office? Here are two possibilities:

1. Turn on ads for Google News, and share some of the pie
Google News already has started putting contextual ads on searches of Google News. (Example.) Why not go further and turn on ads for all of Google News? Click the sports news category and see Google ads in the right column. See them on the Google News homepage.

Of course, if Google did that now, the screams of “Google is making money from my content!” by the media dinosaurs would grow even louder. Some would remove themselves from Google’s reach. But Google could calm down those ancient media beasts by simply starting a program where any publisher that’s tracked by Google News could participate. It would count the number of clicks through to a story that any publisher gets, then at the end of the month distribute a pile of money based on popularity of the various news sources.

The money pool would be filled with the money that Google advertisers paid when users clicked on the ads while using Google News. Google would allot a percentage of the revenue to be split among the publishers.

Why would Google do such a thing? Because going whole-hog on ads on Google News would incense publishers; doing it in a limited way (just search queries, as is the case now) would get less resistance, but Google keeps all the money. I’d think that full-out Google News advertising and Google voluntarily paying out a slice of Google News ad-click revenues to news publishers would mollify the seething and panicking news executives, and probably leave more money in Google’s account. Perhaps some of those dumb proposals to lock down news content would become unnecessary with a healthy revenue stream from Google for quality news publishers. (I emphasize “quality” because this simple scheme would reward the most money to news sites that get the most clickthroughs from Google News.)

I don’t believe that the news industry should demand this. Calling out the lawyers to demand that Google share Google News ad revenues seems like the wrong approach. But Schmidt says he wants to help pay for quality news content and keep reporters working. Google could send waves of money to news producers who continue to give their content away for free online. (Ditto for blogs, if such a program were instituted on Google Blogsearch.)

Based on Schmidt’s words to the NAA today, he thinks that Google can just get more people to click through Google News headlines, in such large numbers that advertising revenue will support news organizations online. I doubt that, and suggest that Schmidt take one step further back and get news publishers money directly from participating in a Google News ad-share program.

How about it, Eric?

2. The perpetual Google pledge drive
This second idea could complement the first. … Not long ago I ran across and wrote about Silicon Valley start-up Kachingle, and I fell in love with the concept. It’s a simple voluntary subscription that you (the online user) pay $5 a month for (or whatever amount you decide), and then that money is divided up each month among websites that you LIKE and that you VISIT. Publishers become Kachingle participants for free and display a medallion, and when Kachinglers who like your site visit, you get some of their money based on how often they visited your site compared to other sites they’ve told Kachingle they like.

It’s a bit NPR-ish in that you voluntarily donate to all the websites and blogs you like; and if you are a cheapskate and want all your content online free, don’t pay but still see everything. Like the scheme above, Kachingle supports quality content sites; popular news sites presumably will get more money from their fans. And money flows automatically, month-after-month, with regular credit card deductions from Kachingle member accounts.

Google could easily support this on Google News, by indicating when its source news sites (and blogs) are Kachingle members, and encouraging GN users to support news and online content by becoming a Kachingle member.

Why would Google to this? Pretty much the answer is the same as for idea No. 1 above. By using the power of Google’s many millions of users to drive voluntary regular contributions to Kachingle, Google would be financially supporting news sites and bloggers who produce quality content. Again, this would be a move to prevent panicky publishers from taking their content away from Google News because they’d have yet another revenue source to support them.

Schmidt told the NAA earlier today:

“If you see a headline what I want you to do is I want you to think, ‘Oh that’s interesting, I want to know more,’ and then based on that I want you to click to the newspaper Web site or to Wikipedia or to wherever. If we can build products — and we have teams at Google working on this — to roughly work like that where there’s a one-liner that’s interesting and you click and go into layer after layer after layer of information — and by the way, not just text but also video and entertainment, and so forth and so on — that’s personalized, we think we can build a business — again, with you guys — with significant advertising resources, where the advertising is targeted to the content. To me that’s the only solution we’ve come up with to this problem.”

Well, that’s going to take a while. Meanwhile, major metro newspapers, some in existence for 150 years, have died, and more will die. The simple ideas above would allow Google to quickly address the media crisis in a meaningful way, AND it would benefit Google.

Mr. Schmidt, I don’t expect you or Google to single-handedly save journalism and the news industry. Yet you have the power to improve the situation significantly. And it’s in your own interest.

What are you waiting for?

Over on ReinventingClassifieds.com, I’ve just posted the beginnings of an “Open Letter to Google.”

It’s in wiki format, and I’m asking your help in writing it.

Read about it in more detail over there, but briefly it’s in response to Google CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt’s public fretting about the state of newspapers and investigative journalism, and his suggestion that Google has a “moral imperative” to help figure out a new advertising model that will support important watchdog and investigative journalism.

If Google is willing to help, then the newspaper industry should take Schmidt up on that.

Here’s a video from AdAge.com of Schmidt sounding the alarm bell: