More Followup on Google's Vision for the Future of News

(MoneyWatch)  Our posts this week about the ideas that Google executives are advocating for helping news sites build better business plans have stimulated quite a bit of conversation, only a fraction of which appears as "comments" following each of our posts. Many people, for whatever reason, prefer to just send me an email, and excerpts from one of those are reprinted here, with the permission of the sender, John Browning in the U.K.

Interesting stuff...It's only half true that stories are the "atomic unit" of news. Yes, they are now free in ways that they weren't before. But as in music this only amplifies the search problem: what don't I know that I'd be interested in knowing next?
Businesses based solely on atomic songs/stories don't do very well over the long term, as the choice is overwhelming. Nobody yet has a very good model as to how to translate not just stories but also editorial choice-making online. So far it's just search or put-whatever- (Google News) you're-doing-in-print-untransparently-online (everybody else)...

John rightly identifies the difficult odds that any piece of content, even a "living unit," will find exposure amidst the blizzard of information that defines our time. If news execs simply unbundle their products down to individual stories, and try to monetize those, will they not end up hopelessly over-stretched?

This concern is similar to that voiced by By Claire Cain Miller blogging in Bits today: "How many more new social networking or micro-blogging or video-sharing sites can one person use? Most of us don't have time to respond to voice mail and e-mail every day, let alone check our Twitter updates and Facebook accounts and Flickr friends..."

Miller was posting from Web 2.0 Expo in New York this week. The parallel with John's point is the concern that we all are getting buried by the sheer volume of companies, products, services, news stories, theme pages, and bits of data of every sort. I sympathize with this POV, and wish I had a suggestion as to how to avoid feeling overwhelmed by it all.

Well, I suppose I do have one small piece of advice. In the days of "old media," many people had their favorite columnists, who they'd check in on every day. Most of these people are online now, so as far as staying with your old faves, that's easy to do. (An example is one of my favorite political analysts, David Brooks, whose columns are available at the New York Times every day, both in the print newspaper or on the website.)

The real problem comes with figuring out whom you can trust in new media. Maybe start small, with a handful of bloggers who write about the things you care about and follow links from their posts to their contacts and sources. Let virality take over from there and shuttle you around the universe of bloggers and websites without benefit of any map or a guide. It may seem random at first, but there is a certain logic emerging among the structure of web content -- not unlike the SEO-driven suggestions the Google execs have been advocating.

The better bloggers should ultimately rise to the top, because people return to them, link to them, email their posts to friends -- one viral move after another. The resultant higher ranking in search engines should enable them to draw in new users, in what theoretically should be a self-perpetuating process. That, at last, is the theory.