While the New York Times was given an early death sentence this week by The Atlantic, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked by Fortune magazine what Google should do to save the ailing newspaper industry. He reiterated his previous “moral imperative” sentiment to do something, but failed to come up with any concrete solutions.
The internet behemoth thrives on curating the flow of information from media outlets, so it has a stake in the future of newspapers. But should Google necessarily intervene? Some think not.
“[The news] has changed permanently, Google is part of that change, Craigslist is part of that change, Facebook is part if that change,” said Jeff Jarvis, media blogger and author of the new book What Would Google Do. “That doesn’t mean they’re responsible for those who don’t adapt to that change. They’re not.”
Here are five things Google could do for newspapers, however, if it decided to implement its own bailout of print media.
1) Buy them
One solution the interviewer suggested was acquiring newspapers and bringing them under Google’s corporate umbrella. Schmidt shot that one down.. at least for now.
“The good news is we could purchase them. We have the cash. But I don't think our purchasing a newspaper would solve the business problems,”
said Schmidt.
“I think the solution is tighter integration. In other words, we can do this without making an acquisition. The term I've been using is 'merge without merging.'”
Google doesn’t want to put money into a company lacking a strategy for success. NYU
journalism professor Jay Rosen tweets: “Eric Schmidt is saying: Charity we can always do. But it's like giving up on the patient.”
2) Do More Do Goodism
Schmidt makes it clear that Google is in the advertising business, and philanthropy should remain separate from the business side. But if it chooses to throw some of its extra cash at the media, there are a number of possibilities.
Dan Froomkin lists a few suggestions at Harvard University’s
NeimenWatchdog, including contributing to non-profit projects like
ProPublica (which Schmidt also mentions), adopting papers to help improve their technology, and creating its own non-profit news organization.
Then there’s always Spot.us, the crowd-funded journalism project run by Knight Foundation grant winner (and wired.com alum) David Cohn. Funding grassroots journalism to bring some organization to that particular open-source movement may be the Next Big Thing in news. What better place to make that twain meet than at established news organizations?
3) Inform the Masses
Google hosts outreach programs for the media to teach journalists about the tools available for them to use. While many newspapers already utilize Google’s products using search optimization,
Google maps and AdSense, it couldn’t hurt to amp up the efforts and campaign to inform the out-of-touch. Frankly, we aren't overwhelmed with Google's efforts to promote this initiative and wonder how many people actually know they even exist.
4.) Improve News Search
While some folks in Belgium are of a different mindset, Google News is great at consolidating stories from across the web. But the search could use a bit of an upgrade to help give more exposure to smaller papers and maybe even prevent incidents like the UAL-Tribune debacle.
“It’s tuned for relevancy over currency,” says Jarvis, who has spoken with several industry execs who share the same opinion.
5.) Bring Classifieds Back From the Dead
Craigslist has been accused of single-handedly killing the newspaper industry by conditioning people to pay as little as zero for classified ads. Craig Newmark famously knows he is leaving perhaps 10s of millions of dollars on the table, and famously could not care less. Meanwhile, the traditional lifeblood for newspapers for your used car is being drained dry by this international classified ad network and by slightly-more-expensive-and-more-complicated auction services like eBay. You can’t blame Craiglist for innovating – despite their business model, they clean up, thank you very much – just like you can’t blame Google. You’d have to blame the entire internet.
Craigslist did donate $1.6 million to UC Berkeley's 'New
Media' program, so it’s not exactly the bad guy. Scott Outing from
Reinventing Classifieds wrote an open letter to Craig and Jim Buckmaster last summer with some suggestions on an intervention, and later posted one to Google which readers could help write (though few did).
Maybe now's the time to make that effort again. Google could pick up a few tips and possibly work with newspapers to build a new network of classifieds. They might start with 2005's "Craigslist Killer" Google Base.
P**hoto: Flickr/blackcustard
