June 8, 2010, 10:05 am
The Medium is Not the News
By Henry Woodbury
Who’s going to save the news? According to James Fallows, Google is. Fallows makes two key points. First, explicitly, that Google is serious about improving the economics of news gathering. Second, implicitly, Google had better be doing it because traditional news publishers are clueless:
…people inside the press still wage bitter, first-principles debates about whether, in theory, customers will ever be willing to pay for online news, and therefore whether “paywalls” for online news can ever succeed. But at Google, I could hardly interest anyone in the question. The reaction was: Of course people will end up paying in some form—why even talk about it? The important questions involved the details of how they would pay, and for what kind of news.
The inefficiency of traditional news organizations is far more profound than the costs of grinding up trees into pulp and running “them through enormously expensive machinery” to hand-deliver a product that is almost immediately out-of-date. That lets television news off the hook. The inefficiency seen by Krishna Bharat, director of Google News, is the redundancy of thousands of publications writing about the same events using the same, predictable, story lines. On this score television’s focus on the blindingly obvious is, in my opinion, far more offensive than print.
The message to traditional news organizations isn’t just “go online.” It’s “start being distinct.” In a global, decentralized, electronic medium, boilerplate reporting deserves to be bested by smarter, deeper, more eclectic aggregations.
