NYT confused on Google News
As Rafat Ali from paidContent suggests, today's NYT piece by Miguel Helft on Google News misses the ball. Here is the nut graf, as we say in the biz:
...while news organizations continue to worry about what Google is doing to their business, the company is far from achieving the kind of dominant position in news that it has in other areas. Six years after its start, Google News appears to be stuck in neutral and struggling to keep up with rivals.
There are a few things that I'm not so sure about here. The first is the implication that somehow Google is trying to move into a "dominant position in news." Doesn't that sort of presuppose that the company aspires to be a media organization? I haven't heard anything about Google hiring reporters or bloggers or even deputizing citizen journalists, so it's not clear to me why the story assumes Google is aiming to knock out, say, the New York Times.
From personal experience working at a newspaper and at news websites, I'd say the importance of Google News has increased in the last year. News websites need all the hits they can get, and Google News is a useful hub for directing traffic to source sites. There's plenty of Web newsroom chatter about how many viewers are supplied by Google �?? and a lot less about how many are taken away. A quote from the story even supports that: Jim Brady, executive editor of WashingtonPost.com, calls Google News "a driver of a significant amount of traffic, which we appreciate.�?�
A few paragraphs later, Helft writes that "Google�??s search and news products have been successful at driving traffic to news sites."
Google's main weakness, it seems, is its inability to "profit" from Google News. When did anyone say that was a priority? The NYT article tries to compare Google News to Yahoo, MSNBC.com, or CNN.com � but these are apples, and Google's an orange.
Since the beginning, Google News has been a technical extension of its core search engine, not a journalistic website. Google has dozens if not hundreds of projects, many of them experimental and intended meant to add value to Google's user experience rather than to generate revenue.
One reasonable knock on the site is that, because it's algorithm-based and therefore can't identify hot stories until multiple outlets have written about them, it's slower to post breaking news. Google could solve that by hiring a couple of human editors; it's not indicative of staleness.
There are plenty of interesting failures to write about on the Web. But Google News isn't one of them.
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posted by adamargitwagner @ 23:17
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