Can Google help save print journalism?
If you’re interested in the future of print journalism then James Fallows’ lengthy Atlantic feature about how Google is helping save newspapers is a must-read.
A few things I learned from the piece:
1. Stop blaming Google for your woes newspapers
Blaming big bad Google for “stealing” all that content is a popular past-time for certain news executives. It’s just plain wrong. Google News lifts abstracts from pieces and doesn’t slice, dice and repackage news like other outlets. Also, you can easily stop Google from indexing your sites. Why wouldn’t you do this? The traffic that Google brings to your site is simply too valuable.
2. The classified ad model is broken
This has been said over and over again, but why anyone would pay for a classified ad when you’ve got eBay and Craigslist and dozens of real estate and auto sales sites is beyond me.
From the article:
The most obvious cause is that classified advertising, traditionally 30 to 40 percent of a newspaper’s total revenue, is disappearing in a rush to online sites. “There are a lot of people in the business who think that in the not-too-distant future, the classified share of a paper’s revenue will go to zero,” Cohen said. “Stop right there. In any business, if you lose a third of your revenue, you’re going to be in serious trouble.”
Important to note that the online entities doing the most damage to newspaper classifieds, Craigslist, job sites, eBay, are not owned or controlled by Google. Newspapers also haven’t whined about how these sites are “stealing” their ads.
3. The bundle is broken
Hard news gathering doesn’t make money. Real estate, car sections, style reporting and entertainment journalism makes cash for newspapers. So papers bundle a Sunday Homes section with that 15,000 feature on rebels in Fallujah.
But the internet (and Google, especially) allows people to break this bundle. Looking for a new car, forget buying the paper and reading the auto section. A quick search can take you to any number of auto sites.
4. The print business is expensive and inefficient
According to the article, editorial staff accounts for 15% of a newspaper’s budget. Newsprint costs, printing, distribution, etc. costs a lot of money, which newspapers are no longer recovering.
From the article:
“Grow trees—then grind them up, and truck big rolls of paper down from Canada? Then run them through enormously expensive machinery, hand-deliver them overnight to thousands of doorsteps, and leave more on newsstands, where the surplus is out of date immediately and must be thrown away? Who would say that made sense?” The old-tech wastefulness of the process is obvious, but Varian added a less familiar point. Burdened as they are with these “legacy” print costs, newspapers typically spend about 15 percent of their revenue on what, to the Internet world, are their only valuable assets: the people who report, analyze, and edit the news.
5. Online ads will become more profitable
It’s clear that print ads are more valuable than online ads. But as more people get their news online Google is assuming this equation will tilt in favour to online ads.
The three pillars of the new online business model, as I heard them invariably described, are distribution, engagement, and monetization. That is: getting news to more people, and more people to news-oriented sites; making the presentation of news more interesting, varied, and involving; and converting these larger and more strongly committed audiences into revenue, through both subscription fees and ads.
6. A thriving journalistic culture helps Google
Google needs the quality content generated by newspaper journalists, columnists and photographers. Like a thriving ecosystem, every newspaper and magazine that fails is another source of content that Google can’t help you find.
Of course, that doesn’t preclude bloggers, citizen journalists, etc. from creating good content. Google will help you find that too. But how many blogs can field City Hall bureaus or are experienced business reporters?
7. Experiment, experiment, experiment
The internet has disrupted print journalism more than any other technology before it; more than radio, more than cable TV and the 24-hour news cycle. The old business model is broken and you won’t be able to humpty-dumpty it back together again. Which means it’s even more crucial that you push forward and try new things.
“We believe that teams must be nimble and able to fail quickly,” Josh Cohen told me. (I resisted making the obvious joke about the contrast with the journalism world, which believes in slow and statesmanlike failure.) “The three most important things any newspaper can do now are experiment, experiment, and experiment,” Hal Varian said.
Or in the words of Samuel Beckett, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
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