Editors' Blog | Journalism.co.uk » Eric Schmidt

TimesOnline seeking questions for Google chief executive

Judith Townend — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:01:56 +0000

Fancy asking Eric Schmidt about the future of online news?

Here’s your chance: TimesOnline is seeking questions to put to the chairman and chief executive of Google for a feature to be published on Friday October 2.

Web development editor at the Times, Joanna Geary, just tweeted that there have already been ten pleas for a job so far…

Submit your question at this link (deadline September 25)Similar Posts:

Reuters: Google CEO raises doubts about Murdoch’s online pay walls

Judith Townend — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:43:19 +0000

Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, yesterday questioned Rupert Murdoch’s plans to put general news content behind pay walls at some of the News Corp titles, Reuters reports.

General news publishers would find it hard to charge for their content because too much is available for free elsewhere, Schmidt argued, speaking via video link to the Royal Television Society audience in Cambridge.

“[M]y guess is for niche and specialist markets … it will be possible to do it but I think it is unlikely that you will be able to do it for all news.”

Full post at this link…Similar Posts:

Jon Bernstein: What if the business model for news ain’t broke?

Jon Bernstein — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:18:01 +0000

In what may feel like a twist of logic too far, there are a growing number of non-media companies who are adopting the Fourth Estate’s digital business model.

That’s the ad-funded, free-to-the-consumer model.

You know the one.

It’s at the root of the crisis afflicting the newspaper industry around the world, an industry which is trying desperately to make money online. Or at least not haemorrhage it.

To believe the unholy trinity that is News International, Daily Mail and General Trust, and the Guardian Media Group, the media model is unworkable, unsustainable and it’s got to go.

The three are not sure if it should be replaced by paywalls, micropayments, subscriptions or something else entirely.

But what they are agreed on is that it cannot be business as usual. Because that business is going under.

So why do we find the likes of Facebook, Digg and the mighty Google – and perhaps soon Amazon- adopting the ad-funded model to support services and software.

Take Gmail. It’s not a media entity, it’s email, but it is ad-supported.

One answer is that that advertising is the last, desperate (and largely) failing attempt to generate some money, given nobody wants to pay for their products. In short: free reigns.

On that latter point, Wired’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson is likely to agree.

His new book ‘Free: The Future of a Radical Price’ – appropriately available to read and listen to online without charge – celebrates ‘freeconomics’, but has a much more positive take on its effect on the business world.

The reason, he says, people are convinced that ad-funded won’t work is because they are applying the conventional rules.

Offline – in newspapers, magazines, billboards, TV and radio – advertising is predicated on scarcity not abundance. Ad sales people trade on ‘space’ and the less there is the higher the yield.

So when there is infinite space online, their greatest selling tool disappears.

Right? Wrong.

Anderson argues that there is another kind of advertising which is epitomised by Google’s text ads:

“Google doesn’t sell space. It sells users’ intentions – what they’ve declared to be interested in, in the form of a search query.

“And that’s a scarce resource. The number of people typing in ‘Berkeley dry cleaner’ on any given day is finite.”

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt – admittedly a man with a vested interest – estimates that the potential market for online advertising is $800bn.

“That’s twice the total advertising market, online and off, today,” notes Anderson.

So why is his tone at such odds with that of the media he is writing about?

Perhaps it has something to do with the production-cycle of book publishing. This book was in train before he had even finished writing the much-admired The Long Tail.

Clearly much of his thinking predates the collapse of Lehman Brothers which sealed our current economic fate.

His penultimate chapter, presumably added very late in the day and titled ‘Coda: Free in a Time of Economic Crisis’, is an acknowlegement of that, although not a denunciation of his core argument.

Just maybe, it’s the down-in-the-mouth media owners who are out of time, not Anderson.

Maybe this rush to find other ways to monetise will be a passing phase and when the economy picks up so too will online advertising revenues.

After all, what’s the alternative?

Pay walls may work for niche information but not for mainstream news and exclusives. That’s something that even the Wall Street Journal, poster child of the paid model, accepts.

Interviewed earlier this year its executive editor Alan Murray said:

“Look, if it’s a big news story, if we report a takeover and – we could hold that behind the pay wall. But if we do, BusinessWeek or someone else will simply write a story saying ‘The Wall Street Journal is reporting x’ and they’ll get all the traffic. Why would we do that?

“So if it’s that kind of a big, broad-interest news story, we’ll put it outside the pay wall and go ahead and take the traffic ourselves, thank you very much.”

Jon Bernstein is former multimedia editor of Channel 4 News. This is part of a series of regular columns for Journalism.co.uk. You can read his personal blog at this link.Similar Posts:

Washington Post: WaPo and Google discussing ‘informal collaboration’

Laura Oliver — Mon, 11 May 2009 12:12:06 +0000

The Washington Post’s chief executive, Donald Graham, has confirmed that the title has been holding talks with Google chief executive Eric Schmidt about a possible collaboration on new ways of presenting news.

No more specific details as yet.

Full article at this link…Similar Posts:

FTM: Google’s Eric Schmidt leaves newspaper conference ‘unscathed’

Laura Oliver — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 08:39:31 +0000

Followthemedia reports on Eric Schmidt’s address to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) yesterday, in which the Google boss said he believed a mixture of ad-supported free content, micropayments and access-all-areas subscription will have to be included on the newspaper website of the future.

But according to FTM, Schmidt didn’t suggest enough ways for Google and newspaper publishers to work together – but then the publishers in the audience didn’t challenge him enough either.

“He [Schmidt] basically believes a newspaper will have its print and internet numbers right if readership is at least five times higher – preferably 10 times higher – on the web than it is in print,” says FTM.

“But again, he didn’t address, and no one asked him, how print was to stay in business with so much of the advertising spend diverted to the web and how maybe that 5:1 or 10:1 ratio could mean that the print financials were no longer viable.”

Full story at this link…

Also, a full but unofficial transcript of the Q&A at PoynterOnline (with removal of incomplete sentences, Julie Moos notes): ‘Transcript of Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Q&A at NAA‘Similar Posts:

CNNMoney.com (Fortune magazine): Google CEO wants to lend a hand to newspapers

Judith Townend — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 11:01:42 +0000

Google CEO Eric Schmidt ‘professes a passionate desire to lend a hand [to newspapers],’ reports Fortune magazine. In an interview with Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky, Schmidt ‘shares some thoughts on how newspapers might yet survive – and how Google might help’. Full story...Similar Posts:

Journalism.co.uk’s top 10… journo-lists

Laura Oliver — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:40:51 +0000

It’s the time of year again for reviews of 2008, top tens, gift guides and all the rest.

Not another list post, I hear you cry. Would we do that to you, us, Journalism.co.uk?

Well, yes, we would.

For your listing pleasure here’s our 10 of the best of the journo-related variety:

1. Regret the Error’s ‘The Year in Media Errors and Corrections’ – as the title suggests.
2. Google’s Zeitgeist 2008 – the most commonly searched for and ‘fastest rising’ words and phrases of the year.
3. 10,000 Words blog’s top 10 posts of the year – and the stories behind them. (This list even includes other list posts, so we’re getting into the spirit now)
4. I Want Media’s Media Person of the Year 2008 – Ariana Huffington beats off competition from Rupert Murdoch and Eric Schmidt of Google.
5. Journalisted – okay, so it doesn’t include web journos rather mainly UK print writers, but the journalists listed in this searchable directory is growing.
6. Another one from 10,000 Words – ’30 must have gifts for journalists’ in true festive, gift guide style.
7. The leaked BNP member’s list – not a list we’d choose to republish, but it certainly sent our blog traffic into overdrive and raised some questions about reporting data leaks.
8. The Committee to Protect Journalists’ index of imprisoned journalists (CPJ) – another sobering entry, but this year’s list from the CPJ found more online journalists were imprisoned as of December 1 than those working in other media.
9. Top Twitterers – not just journalists, but a lovely superficial list and good to see @stephenfry in 16th with only 155 days under his belt at time of writing.
10. This post.

This isn’t the definitive list it could be – online lists can grow – so feel free to add others/plug your own.

UPDATE - some new additions to the pile:

Charlie Beckett recommends the best journalism books of 2008
NowPublic has compiled the best user-generated news moments of the year
Amy Webb’s big list of Twitter applications.

Similar Posts:

Google Zeitgeist videos: Salman Rushdie, Chad Hurley, Gordon Brown, Will Lewis, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey…many more

Oliver Luft — Fri, 23 May 2008 09:24:58 +0000

Google has just held its two day European Zeitgeist conference in the UK bringing together a host of captivating speakers, here are just a few of the session videos – many more on the Zeitgeist YouTube channel.

Matthew d’Ancona interviews Chad Hurley

Sir Salman Rushdie

The future of online video panel with Ashley Highfield and others

Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey Brin

Content vs community panel part 1 (Inc. Mattias Cohler, Facebook, & William Lewis, editor of The Telegraph)

Content vs community part 2

Similar Posts:

Eric Schmidt – Google resistance to ACAP based on technology

Oliver Luft — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:49:28 +0000

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has denied that Google’s resistance to using ACAP is based on ‘wanting to control’ publishers information, insisting that it is strictly a technology issues.

Speaking to iTWire, Schmidt said: “ACAP is a standard proposed by a set of people who are trying to solve the problem [of communicating content access permissions]. We have some people working with them to see if the proposal can be modified to work in the way our search engines work. At present it does not fit with the way our systems operate.”

According to iTWire, Schmidt went on to deny that Google’s reluctance so far to use the rights and permissions technology was because Google wanted as few barriers as possible between online content and its search engines. “It is not that we don’t want them to be able to control their information.”

Schmidt made his comments after a tit-for-tat exchange last week in which Gavin O’Reilly, chairman of World Association of Newspaper and ACAP CEO, reacted strongly to claims made by a senior Google executive that the search engine believed ACAP was an unnecessary system and that its function could be fulfilled by existing web standards.Similar Posts: