Gary Andrews

In newspapers, Rupert Murdoch still very much matters. In the internet, his influence may not be as keenly felt, but when he speaks, people still listen, especially when what he says hints at blocking search engines from his news sites.

How likely is this to happen, and is this a Murdoch misstep or will he surprise us yet again?

It’s worth just quickly starting with paid:content’s report. Murdoch didn’t exactly say that his publications would block search engines, as he seems to be unsure of how his own publication, the Wall Street Journal, currently handles search.

The consensus on Twitter seems to be that Murdoch would be shooting himself in the foot by withdrawing from Google and Google News. As Charles Arthur notes, Google are unlikely to be troubled by this.

More than that, if Techcrunch are to be believed the WSJ gets around twenty-five per cent of its traffic from Google and Google News.

Even if this is some plan to get more people buying into the content he’s locked down behind a paywall, it still doesn’t totally make sense. People still have to find the content somehow (although I suspect The Times, Sun, WSJ et al would only need a fraction of their current users to pay in order to make a decent amount of cash).

Is this a case of a big beast of the old media not really getting the internet? Some would point to MySpace as another example, but I’m not so sure. At the time it was probably a decent buy (not any more, though) and it’s not like Murdoch is the only person from traditional media to make a less-than-stellar purchase of a popular online company. Hell, enough online companies make the same mistake.

Murdoch clearly thinks he’s onto something and it would be more beneficial to him to be out of Google’s directories than in it. Personally, I think he’s mad in this regard – SEO is hugely important for newspapers -but there’s always the nagging sense that he might be working on a masterplan that will have us all in awe.

And it’s also worth remembering that if he somehow convinces a new Conservative government to break up the BBC’s online news offering (not beyond the realms of possibility) then suddenly Murdoch will be in a lot stronger position. Albeit still without SEO or Google ranking.

My own feeling is that Murdoch thinks he can take on Google in a straight fight, much as he took on the UK newspaper market and won. But he may not have realised that the game has changed slightly.

Google isn’t in competition with Murdoch’s empire – at least not directly, and not where journalism is concerned. Google also probably won’t be too fussed if Murdoch’s publications remove themselves from the directory. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of other news sites out there.

Murdoch strikes me as one of those from the old school who seems Google and others as being parasitic. But the trouble with parasites is that unless you find a way to manage them, they will eventually kill their host Murdoch would do well to keep this in mind.

written by Gary \\ tags: Google, Google News, Rupert Murdoch, Wall Street Journal

A full banquet’s worth of thought from Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0:

“The web is the most disruptive force in the history of media, by many orders of magnitude, destroying every assumption on which traditional media businesses are based.

But the market should care, you say. What would happen if we didn’t have the newspapers playing their Fourth Estate watch dog role?

Here’s the bitter truth — the feared loss of civic value is not the basis for a BUSINESS.

The problem with the newspaper industry, as with the music industry before it, is the sense of ENTITLEMENT. What we do is valuable. Therefore we have the right to make money.

Nobody has the right to a business model.

Ask not what the market can do for you, but what you can do for the market.”

People would miss their local paper. But not enough to get outraged and march down the street in protest, I think.

And the death of the local paper, or radio station, won’t mean the death of journalism. It’ll mean that journalism is done somewhere else, probably by somebody else:

“Journalism will find a way. Even if the industries that once supported it do not.”

There’s nothing wrong with trying to retain the audience you’ve got. But retention is fire-fighting. Innovation can start fires elsewhere.

Let’s think about what the staples of the local paper are:

Classifieds? Not any more. Gumtree, eBay, Craigslist and others. Your mates no longer send in embarrassing photos to the paper on your birthday. They stick it up on Facebook.

Letters to the editor? Blogging. Or comments on other blogs.

TV listings? Plenty of those around elsewhere.

Event listings? As above. Google’s as much a friend for this as any other site.

Local sport? Ok, so they’ve got the access. But every club has their official website. Most fans forums post their own thoughts and match reports. The information’s fairly readily available.

Obits? Ok, I’ll give you that one. Nobody does obits quite like a newspaper.

So we just come down to journalism and the quality of the writing (and obits). As nice as it would be to say these are a great reason to keep a paper alive, it doesn’t necessarily stack up for the balance sheet.

Joanna Geary (who flagged up Scott’s piece) has a succinct thought on this:

“If time is becoming increasingly squeezed then I suspect the reasons behind someone dedicating half-an-hour of their time to reading a newspaper have to be even more compelling. Being on public transport and having a paper available for free is one of those reasons.

Even if the newspaper is a great product, with fantastic stories, it may not be something that fits into a person’s life easily.”

The model changed a long time ago, largely thanks to Google [1]. People don’t need to be told what the news is. They can sit at a computer and find out for themselves the news that’s relevant to them (and this is coming from somebody who still loves flicking through the papers and finding random articles of stuff I never knew about. But then isn’t that what StumbleUpon is for?).

And PR: don’t think you’re immune from this. The conversation’s happening around you, not necessarily with you. The web doesn’t need press officers to kick-start and control the conversation. Its perfectly capable of doing that for itself. The question is now how to get into that conversation, not how to control it.

And, strangely, after all that, I still feel optimistic for the future of the media: both journalism and PR. But just not in their current guises. Especially not local journalism if it carries on in its current state. Sorry.

[1] If newspaper editors want to start pointing fingers at websites that are killing their industry, they’d be better off looking there than the BBC’s plans for local news.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: Google, journalism as a business, local journalism, markets

Some ideas are so simple you wonder why nobody’s thought of them before. Google’s flu trends is one of these.

Some bods at Google noticed that by cross referencing searching for flu symptoms they could predict outbreaks by monitoring search patterns:

“So why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza.”

Google Trends is a very useful and powerful tool and this shows how the company can work beyond just mere search. Their Flu Trends is one of those little snippets that makes you excited about the web all over again – and shows that it’s more than just a bunch of geeks sitting around talking about social media (guilty as charged). With this kind of data, there’s no end to what else they could achieve, not least for our health.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: flu, flu symptoms, Google, Google flu trends, Google Trends, search