Google’s stupid advice to newspapers: stop being newspapers

‘ENGAGE WITH your readers,’ is the latest blindingly obvious advice being doled-out to down in the mouth journalists and publishers. In a clear case of the messenger being the message, the only reason anyone noted this statement was that it came from the horse’s mouth – or the mawing yap of Beelzebot itself, depending on your view. That is, Google, the machine that ate the news.

Speaking at a US Federal Trade Commission event on the future of journalism (1) – such events being the main growth sector in the media industry – Google’s chief economist Hal Varian said that charging for news won’t work.

He also blogged his remarks. Of course. (2)

Skipping neatly past the fact that Google’s having a ‘public policy blog’ indicates the outfit’s inflated sense of importance, Varian’s remarks boil down to two key ideas.

Firstly, Varian claims that ‘generic’ news outfits cannot charge for ‘content’. What he means is that specialised services such as the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and, presumably, Water and Wastewater Treatment magazine (yes, it’s real) can charge for specialist, informed and, often, up-to-the-minute information that is of immediate commerical use. In addition, these publications are often paid for on company account rather than by individual subscribers.

It all sounds terribly sensible, doesn’t it? The problem is, Varian’s definition of ‘generic’ news is not one that any newspaper should recognise. There is, in fact, no such thing as ‘generic’ news. Something is either news or it is not – and if it is not then it has no business being on the news pages.

True, the over-reliance on wire services, particularly for foreign coverage, is a problem the news publishing industry brought on itself in the name of cutting costs – this in itself is not news, it has been public knowledge for years. Similarly, the presence of ‘news’ of dubious merit – what is now called ‘churnalism’ – may be a cheap way to fill pages but it has a deleterious effect on not only newspaper quality, but how readers view their newspaper.

Still, for all their faults, any decent newspaper, metropolitan, national or international is not a generic product. It is, in fact, the world in your hands.

Varian’s second point amounts to a suggestion that newspapers transform themselves into something else.

His vision of the future of news is at odds with the traditional role of newspapers: to inform the reader of events of universal significance in order to allow themselves to orient themselves in the world. Instead of this Varian wants to see a mixture of user-generated content and ‘experiments like Fast Flip, Living Stories and Starred Stories’.

Varian’s argument maintains that news has always been ‘cross-subsidised’ by non-news material, principally in the form of supplements or, ‘special interest sections on topics such as Automotive, Travel, Home & Garden, Food & Drink, and so on’. The reason for this, he says, is that these sections deliver ‘contextual advertising’, which he says is more valuable than general advertising. Contextual advertising also happens to be Google’s sole source of revenue, something I shall return to.

Were Varian’s suggestions to be taken-up en masse by publishers we wouldn’t be seeing the development of a new ‘newspaper for the twenty-first century’ or any such thing. We already have a name for the kind of publication he is proposing – it’s called a magazine.

Sadly newspapers don’t need much encouragement to move away from news, though. Even in these recessionary times picking-up a copy of the Sunday Times is virtually an act of weightlifting due to the plethora of supplements included while just yesterday the Independent (of London) ran an article profeering advice on the ‘best’ desk lamps. (3) (4) It would be churlish to complain about such features if they are contributing to keeping newspapers’ heads above the water but there can be few who truly believe they’ve got much to do with news.

Taking a local example, several critics have claimed that Ireland’s ‘newspaper of record’, the Irish Times, has moved rightward politically. In fact it has, like all newspapers, simply become softer.

For one, media commentator and journalism lecturer at the Dublin Institute of Technology Harry Browne claims that since the early years of the current decade, the Irish Times has swung ‘dangerously to the right’. (5)

One one level, his argument is a compelling one. The Irish Times certainly no-longer champions all of the liberal causes of the day. In fact, it stands accused of ignoring significant extra-parliamentary political issues such as the protests objecting to the Corrib gas pipeline and the use of Shannon airport by the US Army in invading Iraq, preferring to dedicate its political coverage to shenanigans in the Dáil, an institution that is now virtually empty of meaning.

Regardless of the merits or otherwise of the motives behind the Corrib protests, it is a newsworthy issue and is exactly the kind of fashionable cause – brave locals versus ‘big oil’ – that is often considered to be of significant interest to a liberal audience. The use of Shannon airport by the US military, meanwhile, was of clear constitutional significance to the country. Given Ireland’s neutral stance, the complicity of the Irish authorities in the war on Iraq and, allegedly, in the CIA’s clandestine programme of prisoner ‘rendition’, is a clear constitutional conflict. And yet, since the revelations first appeared, the Irish Times’s coverage of these matters has been muted.

But this doesn’t mean the Times has developed a covert conservative agenda. It is simply responding to the shrinking of the public sphere. (6)

Today every tiny personality-driven spat among the political and business classes is inflated into an affair of national significance, as we have seen in not one, but four resignations in recent weeks – one from the Dáil, one from the Seanad and two from ministerial posts. But when everything matters, nothing does. Ireland today, quite simply, has no politics at all. How could it? Politics is dependent on there being a public sphere to engage with. The privatisation of people’s complaints is an inevitable outcome of the lack of purchase these complaints had in a society that has become entirely managerial in nature.

The collapse of old certainties – popular capitalism, republicanism, socialism, Catholicism – has had a devastating effect on Irish public discourse but it need not result in society being left in an unpolitical daze. Newspapers exist solely to service this public sphere with information about… the new(s).

Today this role is sadly reduced. As journalist and professor Andrew Calcutt has it: ‘More than that, nowadays we journalists hardly dare claim to ‘speak truth to power’, because we have largely conceded that truth is beyond our ken.’ (7)

In order for news to have any value it must have meaning and for news to have meaning society must be able to have serious discussions and make qualitative judgements. News understood in this way is vastly different from how the likes of Google understand it. Calcutt again:

‘When professional journalists compare one story with another – the comparison which repetitive reporting will prompt them to make automatically, in their mind’s eye they are exchanging one human experience for another. This enables them to rate the new story according to its ‘news value’, i.e. to identify its significance in relation to other stories. But there is more to this rating than the ratings (viewing figures, readership, professional status). The fact that individual human beings can understand the experiences of other individuals, and even their own, depends on those experiences being exchangeable, commensurate, measured according to the same scale.’ (8)

In his autobiography, Up with the Times, former Irish Times editor Conor Brady gives a telling insight into the newspaper’s direction, noting that during the 1990s the newspaper ‘sent a talented young feature writer, Róisin Ingle, to Belfast, to work alongside the news team there’. (9) Despite Brady’s nonchalance this is a telling admission. Since the outbreak of the conflict in the North of Ireland in 1969 Irish, and for that matter British, news organisations have focussed on describing life in the North in two ways: hard news and commentary.

News reports described the pogroms, the bombs, the assassinations, the civil strife, the protests, the riots and the political process – or lack thereof. Comment pieces analysed this news, attempting to make sense of the conflict for an often distant audience. Features were of course written, often attempting to tell the stories behind the conflict by describing the day-to-day lives of people caught in the middle, but the focus was almost exclusively on hard news.

Sending a dedicated features writer to Belfast, however, was both a qualitative and quantitative leap. That this happened during the Northern peace process is no coincidence. The wearing-down of the conflict in its last decade made its news value slowly decline. At the very same time this offered the opportunity to produce softer feature material – not any less worthwhile, journalistically speaking, but very different in tone and, more importantly, objective to news.

Google does not understand this. As the saying goes, ‘When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’ To the one-eyed technologist everything looks like data – or mere ‘content’.

Let’s face facts: Google’s advertising programme, AdWords, is bottom-feeding rubbish, if profitable rubbish. Yes, keyword-based ads are effective for certain kinds of purchases but they are simply a well-targeted version of the classified advertising local newspapers and rags like Loot! and Buy and Sell have been peddling for decades: useful and formerly profitable, but no more the stuff of Mad Men than a regurgitated press release is the stuff of IF Stone.

The fact that so many American metropolitan newspapers could be undermined by AdWords speaks volumes about the parlous state of American news publishing: if people were really only buying the newspaper to look at small ads for random junk then the newspapers had already lost their way.

Google didn’t kill newspapers and neither will it save them. Only we, the polis, can. When the public sphere has meaning once more newspapers will prosper. Whether they are delivered on paper or on screens is a mere technical matter.

JASON WALSH is a freelance journalist and has contributed to the Irish Times, the Irish Examiner, Daily Ireland, the Sunday Times, the Guardian and the Independent (of London). He is a stringer as Ireland correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor in Boston, MA.

(1) See: press release: FTC Announces Second Workshop on the Future of Journalism March 9-10 at Headquarters, US Federal Trade Commission, February 23, 2010
(2) Newspaper economics: online and offline, Hal Varian, Google Public Policy blog, March 9, 2010
(3) The ten best desk lamps, Rebecca Burns, the Independent, March 9, 2010
(4) It is certainly no reflection on the journalist: we’ve all written similar material – because we were told to.
(5) Irish Times, Harry Browne, the Dubliner magazine, May 2006
(6) For more detail on this issue, see: Ireland’s incredible shrinking (public) sphere, Jason Walsh, forth, February 24, 2010
(7) Objection! The Case for Professional News Reporting, Andrew Calcutt, Proof: Reading Journalism and Society, Volume 1, 2010
(8) Ibid
(9) Up with the Times, Conor Brady, Gill and Macmilan, Dublin, 2006,  p. 264