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The issue of #Google and the news industry is this: Google is a massive advertising company. They are part of a live experiment in changing communications and publishing systems, and doing it without much understanding of what will happen as a result of their actions 1/x
Along with other advertising companies (notably Facebook) that use mass data aggregation to reengineer and make the advertising business far more efficient, they have changed the economics of content production and monetization 2/x
(Google News (the product) could never have been built by the news industry, collectively or individually, because it only works as a result of all the *other* development done on the Google core search platform. Billions of dollars of engineering etc). 3/x
Google’s benefit from ‘news’ in terms of all data points aggregated, and all searches and time spent is 🤷♀️. We don’t really have a definition of ‘news’ that would help us calculate that. There are thousands of news outlets now that did not exist when Google was built even 🤔 4/x
Framing Google/FB and the effect on the ‘news industry’ in terms of $ amounts is not very helpful. Framing it as the concentration of money and data in the advertising market is a better. Google and FB do not ‘owe’ the news industry any fixed amount, however ...5/x
Google /FB etc in changing the advertising market and publishing economics have also had the effect of making it very difficult for reporting organizations to be sustainable through advertising . They do not properly understand publishing . This is a problem for everyone, 6/x
We should be very concerned about the prospect of Google /FB/Amazon/ etc being in charge of how reporting organizations will be funded, and how news will be seen. We should be concerned about the opacity of their efforts in these areas and the lobbying expenditure behind it 7/x
We should be concerned that lobbying and PR efforts like #Newsgeist (👋) are so enthusiastically embraced by news executives, journalists and even yes, academics .We should be concerned that reworking news models is being left to opaque commercial non-journalistic entities 8/x
We should be concerned that as the ad supported publishing model disappears, (eliminating both bad and good journalism) that we don’t have a coherent civic plan to remake a better model (in the US) beyond outsourcing the work to ...Google and Facebook, and removing regulation 9/x
The old model of commercial news media was not great . The new commercial model has managed to be *somehow even worse* . It’s not about a bogus $5bn figure. It’s about having a better plan , and finding the funds to do it /ends
