Jumat, 13 Januari 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

What would a Google News Plus Your World look like?

Posted: 12 Jan 2012 11:30 AM PST

How soon until we get a Google News “Plus Your World?”

With the introduction of the oddly extraterrestrial-sounding Google “Search Plus Your World”, the company proclaimed their latest experiment is “transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships.” The world of search gets split up and re-filtered through the things Google knows you like and information from the people around you.

Now, since the announcement there’s been much controversy over how “the things Google knows you like” seems to be driven almost entirely by Google+, not larger competitors Facebook and Twitter, which has led to cries for an antitrust inquiry. But let’s set that aside for a moment and think about what the underlying idea of Search Plus Your World could mean for Google News.

Here’s what we know of how Search Plus Your World works:

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;

2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,

3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

Let’s say you were interested in Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney. Taking the normal route through Google News, you’d most likely try searching for “mitt romney” or click on the newly added Elections header and get links to stories from usual suspects like USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and more.

If you dropped a “Search Plus” layer to that, what might you expect? If your Google+ friends are sharing stories about Romney, they might get shoved to the top. That would likely mean they’d be more closely aligned to your friends’ political perspectives; your liberal friends are probably sharing anti-Romney pieces, your conservative ones pro-Romney ones. (Well, unless they’re conservatives who don’t like Romney, but that’s another issue.) You might also see individual Google+ pages from Romney, other G.O.P. candidates — and maybe even the G+ pages of individual reporters who are covering the campaign and writing some of the stories you’re being shown.

That probably sounds a little familiar to what we’ve come accustom to seeing on Twitter and Facebook. But neither of those sites is fueled by the same combination of search and network. Twitter search looks at everybody’s tweets; Facebook’s news feed just flows on by, driven by Facebook’s algorithms rather than your search interests. Google has the search DNA, the news-crawling infrastructure, and at least the start of the network knowledge that could combine to make something new.

Those are pretty powerful assets and remain the reason Google still inspires animosity in some news executives and antitrust lawyers. A Google News Plus Your World (let’s call it “Google News+” for the sake of brevity) could in theory provide users a social news service that (whether they like it or not) knows about their browsing habits and social graph while also filtering “news” product out of the larger mass of the web.

Google News already provides tools for customization, but most (though not all) rely on users’ being interested in fiddling — yes to business, no to entertainment, more Wall Street Journal, less Cat Fancy. The genius of the social news feed is that it bases those decisions off of network data. You just need to build a network.

But let’s stretch the speculation just a bit further: the toggle. One of the more clever aspects of Search Plus is the ability to shift back and forth between normal and personalized search with one little switch. The toggle is a way to dodge the backlash that comes when any product is seemingly irreversibly redesigned (and built on seemingly self-serving decisions of the sort that gets lawyers involved).

For a notional Google News+, that little switch would be a dividing line for readers between the fire hose and a curated feed. It could also be, as Steven Levy points out over at Wired, the pin that pops Eli Pariser’s Filter Bubble. That kind of freedom, to jump back and forth between the personalized feed and the raw stream, is not common on news sites. The toggle is a promise of serendipity, but also the comfort of your favorite, trusted news service, which, if you are someone still mourning the transformation of Google Reader, could harken back to glory days of the RSS service.

One bit of groundwork is already laid for something like Google News+: the integration of journalists Google+ profiles into Google News. Connecting authorship to identity is an ongoing Google interest, beginning with the authorship markup language that spotlighted writers in search results. As Google tries to integrate social into every corner of their business, a fully social-fied Google News would seem like a logical next step.

The newsonomics of the long goodbye: Kodak’s, Sears’, and newspapers’

Posted: 12 Jan 2012 08:30 AM PST

No old-world icon is safe. Just in recent weeks, both Kodak and Sears have percolated back into the news, offering headline writers a dilemma borrowed from the classic Saturday Night Live Weekend Update line, “Generalíssimo Francisco Franco is still dead.”

How long have these companies been dying? Yes, it was a surprise sometime a long time ago, that digital media was challenging Kodak and that Walmart, Target, Kohl’s, and later Amazon were making life difficult for one of America’s retailing pioneers.

Ask an American in 1990 if they could imagine a world without Kodak. Or a shopper of a world without Sears. Now, in 2012, it’s a lot easier to imagine. These are companies ebbing away, drip by agonizing drip. Which reminds us, of course, of the newspaper industry, and the question still on some lips: Can you imagine a world without newspapers? Now two years into the tablet, it’s much more easily imaginable. I always laugh when asked the question, “Will newspapers exist in 2015 or 2020?” Papyrus is a durable medium. It’s just that digital is rapidly replacing print, and in the process rapidly restructuring the nature of news ownership, news creation, news employment, and more. We’ll have some kind of print for the rest of our lives, but it will be the sidecar to the revving engine of digital news and information, as more and more publishers call it quits on print.

We like to think of change in the world as an on/off switch. This….or that. In fact, the world changes both in an instant and agonizingly slowly.

Let’s call the slow disappearance of familiar brands the newsonomics of the long goodbye. Take companies that have huge imprints in our culture and habits — and cashflows to match — and their disappearance from our lives can seem like it is moving in glacial digital time. But that disappearance is no less real. It is a fact of the news landscape that newspapers, and to some extent consumer print magazines, will disappear over time. We can take bets how much more quickly they’ll continue to vanish. By continue, I mean that data shows 44 percent less newsprint usage (and about 75-80 percent of all newsprint usage is attributed to newspapers) over the past four years, according to The Reel Time Report. (And for more on the industry-leading Michigan Meltdown, check out Alan Mutter’s column at E&P.)

So we can see this goodbye is both real and long. At some point, though, you see this message (on one medium or another), “Kinograph to cease production of silent films,” as borrowed from the neo-silent film The Artist. (Perhaps someday we’ll be talking about “neo-print”?)

Let’s ask a couple of questions about the relationship of Kodak, Sears, and newspapers. How do their revenue slides compare? What lessons apply across the three?

On revenues, take a look at the chart below. I’m tracking revenues from Kodak, Sears, and all U.S. dailies through 2010 — with final 2011 data not yet in, though the year wasn’t kind to any of the three.

What stands out most prominently is that U.S. newspapers’ ad revenue decline is worse, percentage wise, than either Kodak’s or Sears’. Yes, although Kodak and Sears are now poster children of legacy businesses gone wrong, newspapers — as counted through their main revenue source — are doing worse.

Ad revenue is down 53 percent over the period shown, while Kodak’s overall revenues are down 49 percent. Sears’ overall revenues (I removed Kmart revenues, which became part of the Sears Holding Company in a 2005 merger) are down 31 percent over the same period.

The savings grace for newspapers has been circulation revenue, down a relatively low 6 percent in the last decade. Circulation has continued to plummet, but continuing price increases have moderated the revenue losses. Circulation revenue now makes up about 30 percent of all U.S. daily newspaper revenue, so it’s significant — but not enough to stabilize companies reeling from ad revenue loss.

If you combine ad and circulation revenue, over the decade, newspapers have lost 45 percent of the two tentpoles of their business overall, four points less than Kodak.

Share prices will tell us a similar story, as investors — slow to the understanding of the long goodbye — head for the exits.

What are the threads among our three cases? Digital news pioneer Steve Yelvington shared a similar thought about Kodak/newspapers relationship, this week, noting that “brands decay” and “disruption doesn’t happen just once,” among other lessons.

Let’s extend the metaphor. Remember those “Kodak Photo Spots,” where tourists were encouraged to stand and take the exact same picture that tens of thousands had taken before them? Let’s put the newspaper owner — or buyer, given that there’s been a spate of recent purchases — on that spot, and see what they can see about this landscape.

The viewing is hugely important. Why? While we may say newspapers are dying, we can say long live the news. Those owning — or buying into or creating news franchises — do still have time to pivot and learn from failure. History is not fate; this Kodak/Sears history is simply a big cautionary tale from which to learn, a slomo Kodak moment.

With that in mind, let me suggest five points of learning deeply applicable to news management decisions of 2012:

  • Don’t believe your own b.s. Public companies carefully apply their makeup as they talk with analysts and shareholders, as do politicians. Too often, though, they begin to believe what they see in the mirror. Trumpeting the future of the department store, or of “photography,” or of community newspapering doesn’t solve the fundamental issues of disruption plaguing them. Give credit to the few change agents who publicly proclaim that the clock is ticking and that the current business model will explode sooner rather than later.
  • Cutting costs ≠ innovation. Simple, right? Yet Sears chairman Eddie Lampert, heralded early as a whiz by some in the business press when he took over the company in 2005, cut and cut and then cut some more, making the unattractive Sears floors even more moonscape-like than before. Most newspaper companies have cut so much, while driving out nodes of innovators here and there, that they are left half-staffed for the apps/HTML5/digital circulation revolutions playing out before them. Innovation means at least fast-following; otherwise, you’re left in the dust.
  • Constant re-organizing and re-structuring doesn’t mask deeper problems; it just diverts time from consumer focus. Kodak is now reorganizing its units; Sears has done the same in recent years. How many times have newspaper companies shifted back and forth from standalone digital units to integrated operations, in the process losing time and focus, no matter the potential benefits of reorganization?
  • Selling assets is a short-term band-aid. Kodak, as it makes a last stand, is busily trying to sell off its intellectual property, though the value of much of that IP is in question. The sale may raise some cash, but it won’t solve long-term issues, and it will sap ability to innovate. Newspapers don’t have much IP (they have intellectual capital, perhaps), so they are selling their only real assets, their buildings and land, and leasing back quarters. That may buy time — but not that much.
  • And, finally, perhaps the biggest parallel: The old companies are still stuck in a manufacturing mindset. Kodak creates film and products. Sears sells products. Newspapers print products and far too many “print” websites. The new world is about service. iPhone photos are about capturing moments, sometimes for family scrapbooks, but far more often adding to our individual and collective memories, of events, places; they are the kinds ofextensions to our brains that we’ve lately come to accept. Retailers like Target (“Expect more. Pay less.”) are about about price, but also attitude and service. News is about getting what I want now, not a physical product. Of course, it’s tough to change such a manufacturing mindset — one that produced profits to drool over for decades. The manufacturing mindset, though, is oh-so-last-century, and those that adhere to it are going down with it.

One newer victim of the old mindset may give us pause: Best Buy. Best Buy built expensive and dominating superstores, eating alive the CompUSAs and Circuit Cities. Now Amazon and a hundred websites have made buying a 62-inch TV cheaper and as easy to deliver to your house as a sweater. Faced with disappointing financial results in an otherwise booming holiday season, Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn, like his Kodak, Sears, and newspaper counterparts before him, is left to sputter: “This misguided perspective [that electronics buying is moving profoundly online] is especially troubling for me, because it blatantly and recklessly ignores overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” His irritation is understandable — but history is proving increasingly hostile to those failing to adapt fast enough.

Kodak camera photo by Kevin Stanchfield used under a Creative Commons license.
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