TechCrunch has a summary of a presentation by Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, on the decline of newspaper advertising revenues.
“The fact of the matter is that newspapers have never made much money from news,” says Varian. They make money from “special interest sections on topics such as Automotive, Travel, Home & Garden, Food & Drink, and so on.” The problem is that on the web, other niche sites which cater to those categories are a click away, leaving the newspapers with sections which are harder to sell ads against, such as sports, news, and local.
Google’s head of public policy and government relations pushed the ‘don’t be evil’ line at last night’s Amnesty International social media event, with emphasis on user power and responsible company behaviour.
Also speaking were the Guardian’s digital media research editor, Kevin Anderson; Annabelle Sreberny, professor of global media and communication at SOAS; and author and blogger Andrew Keen: who spoke from the US via an iPhone held up to the mic by the event chair, BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones.
“[A] very important thing to understand about the way our business operates is that our users choose to use it,” Pointer later told Journalism.co.uk.
“We don’t have a contract with our users that ties them into our services. They haven’t invested a lot of money in our software packages.
“The way we keep our users is by continuing to provide good, leading edge innovative services: they’re free at the click of a mouse to choose an alternative to Google.”
Providing valuable services for users keeps the search giant – which owns YouTube as well as running a host of other products – on its toes, she said.
Improving the transparency of the recently launched social media application Google Buzz was one such reaction to user complaints, she added.
When the company realised improvements could be made, they were implemented, she said: “that’s something we did within hours and not days.”
While Pointer argued that no user information was ever revealed before an individual went through the Buzz set-up process, she said it had been necessary to make changes to the visibility of the user controls.
The addition of Buzz to the Google Dashboard allowed even greater user control over settings, she argued.
Teams at the New York Times and Washington Post have already been experimenting with Living Stories, which creates an in-depth topic page for a story using technology that dynamically updates the page as events unfold.
Since we launched this proof-of-concept test on Google Labs in December, 75 per cent of people who sent us feedback said they preferred the Living Stories format to the traditional online news article. Users also spent a significant amount of time exploring stories. This tells us there’s a strong appetite for great journalism displayed in a compelling way.
The code for the project will now be openly available so developers can build their own Living Story pages, says the post.
The organisation that runs Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, has received a $2 million grant from Google, or more specifically, Google Inc. Charitable Giving Fund of Tides Foundation.
The funds will support core operational costs of the Wikimedia Foundation, including investments in technical infrastructure to support rapidly-increasing global traffic and capacity demands. The funds will also be used to support the organization’s efforts to make Wikipedia easier to use and more accessible.
For the 2009/10 fiscal year, Wikimedia raised over $8 million in its annual fundraiser, from over 230,000 donors, it was announced last month.
The hype surrounding Apple’s new touch-screen mini-computer, predictably, is huge. Just like film studios, book and textbook publishers, news producers are hoping the iPad can boost the online, mobile content marketplace.
Here’s a “source”, who purports to have worked with Apple CEO Steve Jobs, telling the Wall Street Journalexactly what it wants to hear:
Mr. Jobs is “supportive of the old guard, and [he] looks to help them by giving them new forms of distribution”.
One publishing CEO was even moved to write poetry about it (via Moconews.net) and Apple fanboys and news executives will no doubt be glued to their screens when Jobs takes the stage at around 6pm (GMT) tonight to announce the details.
But when the hype dies down, will the journalism business really be in better shape? These people have taken a welcome dose of reality juice:
Craig McGill, a former journalist now plying his trade at digital PR firm Contentlymanaged, quite reasonably asks who is going to create all the content for new organisations’ multiplatform mobile packages given all the job cuts in news publishing in the past year.
Forrester analysts Charles Golvin and James McQuivey consider that maybe the iPad won’t be all it’s cracked up to be: “It is flawed in meaningful ways: It’s a computer without a keyboard, it’s a digital reader with poor battery life and a high price tag, and it’s a portable media player that can’t fit in a pocket.” (via paidContent.org)
I couldn’t put it better than David Campbell, a professor of cultural and political geography, did this morning: “Information and distribution are separate. Journalism is information, tablet distribution. Can help journalism circulate but can’t ‘save’ it.”
The model is attractive: there are more than 100 million iTunes accounts with users’ credit cards pre-loaded and ready to go. A new shiny, powerful device – somewhere between an e-reader and a netbook – could just persuade people to buy the news subscriptions the New York Times and Rupert Murdoch so desperately want to sell them.
But Apple’s new device is just another distribution platform for words, pictures, videos and data, just like PCs, mobiles and print. Recreating a print experience on another device is not going to solve the economic crisis news finds itself in: Google will still be more efficient at selling advertising and will still point readers to free content.
The future of news is about distributing content as widely as possible and monetising not just content but relationships. Devices will be a big part of that, but they’re not the answer.
Photo credit: Mike McCaffery, from Flickr, via a Creative Commons licence.
UPDATE: This post was amended to reflect the announcement of the name of the device, iPad.
Patrick Smith is a freelance journalist and event organiser, and formerly a correspondent for paidContent:UK and Press Gazette. He blogs at psmithjournalist.com and is @psmith on twitter.
Google News introduced a new recrawl feature this week, which allows the search engine to revisit news articles for changes – most frequently on the first day after Google finds them.
For readers, this feature is intended to reduce the number of outdated headlines and dead links you might find. And for publishers, rest assured that we’ll be back to find your latest stories and updates as soon as we can.
Air controller and blogger Melanie Schregardus has lodged a complaint with the Irish Mail on Sunday after the newspaper ran an article about her at the weekend. Schregardus was horrified, she says, when a friend notified her about the article, entitled ‘The male chauvinist pigs of Irish air control’.
The Irish Mail on Sunday (part of the Associated Newspapers group) reported, alongside her photograph, that she had ‘lifted the lid’ on a ‘den of male chauvinists’ in the Shannon air control tower.
Schregardus was surprised because, she claims, the journalist had not been in touch to ask about her blog, or inform her that they were writing an article.
[I] wrote a blogpost called “Women? In Air Traffic Control?”. I wrote it in response to people on Twitter and in my life who wanted to know what it was like to do my job. There aren’t many of us. Most people don’t meet many Air Traffic Controllers, and it has, in films, media, and most portrayals, been depicted as a job done mainly by men.
I tried to talk in it about what it was like for me, nearly a decade ago, being one of the first women to do my job in Ireland. I didn’t then, and do not now, think my work colleagues are “Male Chauvinist Pigs”, as the Mail headlined their article. I love my job, and the people I work with. I was talking about how I felt years ago, starting out, slightly scared and intimidated by the responsibilities that people who do my job hold in our hands.
Schregardus’ originally deleted her blog but told Journalism.co.uk that was a “knee jerk reaction” and she later realised she “had nothing to be ashamed of”.
“Luckily I had always saved my posts so I set up a blog again and copied everything back in. The only difference is that the dates on all posts is now the 24th Jan.”
Upset by the way her blog comments had been used in the Mail on Sunday, she has now contacted the newspaper to make a complaint. After speaking to a member of the newspaper, she now awaits a response.
She has also contacted the press commission, she said, and is seeking legal advice.
The Irish press council could not confirm the status of Schregardus’ complaint: “The policy of this office is that all matters relating to a complaint remain confidential until the complaints process has been concluded, when all the relevant details are published on our website,” the body said in an email to Journalism.co.uk.
Journalism.co.uk will continue to attempt to contact the Irish Mail on Sunday for further comment.
According to the News Users report, when news consumers need instant news, 57 per cent will go to digital sources. In this situation they are also more likely to go to an aggregator (31 per cent) than a newspaper site (8 per cent) the survey suggested.
When it comes to news sites vs aggregators, the research suggested that local newspapers still had the upper hand on local topics, such as family events, but says in its release that there are “cracks in the house”.
Germany’s newspaper and magazine publisher associations, the VDZ and BDZV, have filed a complaint with the country’s Federal Cartel Office against Google, Deutsche Welle reports.
Although details as to the exact nature of the complaint have not yet been released, the main concern is believed to revolve around “snippets” from media websites and news articles which show up in search results on Google News. Publishers say Google has not paid for the use of these articles, and that regulations must be tightened to protect the authors from plagiarism.
The associations also say the way search results are currently listed is unfair. In November, a BDZV official said his group wanted to know why some Google News results were ranked higher than others.
New Associated Press (AP) stories, hosted by Google itself, are no longer appearing in Google News, reports Danny Sullivan for SearchEngineLand.com.
It’s true. Since Dec. 24, Google has no longer added new AP content, something the company confirmed with me today [Friday]. I received this statement:
“We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. Some of that content is still available today. At the moment we’re not adding new hosted content from the AP.”
So why not? The statement doesn’t explain. But it’s reasonable to assume it’s related to the ongoing talks between Google and the Associated Press.
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