Google May Save Papers, Not Kill Them
Google didn't force the New York Times to buy the Boston Globe for $1.1 billion, nor whisper to Sam Zell that what a newspaper like the Chicago Tribune really needs is billions of dollars in debt. Google never told reporters to resist writing for the Web because their papers' Internet sites would "scoop" them, and didn't utter the siren's call to quick profits by allowing giant conglomerates to consolidate the industry, thus squelching heterogeneity and vitality.
Google is a convenient scapegoat for hidebound publishers and editors who have failed to confront the changes to their industry as profound as the one that shook railroads, and blaming Google for the failure of the newspaper industry is like blaming travel agents for the advent of the airplane. But even my colleague Erik Sherman criticizes it for mooching off content producers.
Just because publishing is headed off a cliff doesn't mean it has to go over it, but it isn't Google that has to change -- publishing has to change. I was talking to Caroline Vanderlip, CEO of SharedBook, a vendor of publishing technology that allows customers to aggregate Web content and turn them into bound books. The Encyclopedia Britannica will start using this to create new books from their archives and allow consumers to order copies using on-demand print.
This technology could also be used by publishers to allow consumers to create their own anthologies from any variety of publishers -- for instance, a teacher might create a new textbook using a chapter from Michael Herr's Dispatches and a sampling of A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo. Or a series of Pulitzer Prize winning articles about the war in Iraq or health care -- things publisher's can't afford to publish because there's not enough demand.
But this isn't happening -- "publishers aren't working together to offer collective products," Vanderlip told me, shaking her head in frustration. She had plenty more to say off the record, but she doesn't want to alienate her customers. Of course, working collectively, or with SharedBooks's technology, won't solve all their problems. There isn't a silver bullet. First, however, publishers have to stop bleeding from their self-inflicted wounds.
Sadly, though, it's unlikely that the daily newspapers we know and love today will see the light of 2015, because management and reporters alike are clinging to paradigms of a prior era. Issues like distribution, immediacy, objectivity -- even the very notion of beats -- need to be revisited. Publishing is also the one business that continues cranking out product without asking their customers what they want -- the assumption is that publishers know best. So publishers don't even know how people prefer getting information, or what kind of content they're looking for.
One thing we do know is that most people visit newspapers sites as the result of a search -- we know this because less than 15 percent of a typical newspaper's Web traffic is on the home page. So search is one of the primary drivers of traffic and thus revenue for online publications. As a result, papers are falling over themselves trying to optimize their sites for Google, worrying about their Google page rank (which influences how high on the search result page their stories appear) and obsessing over keyword terms in headlines. Editors who focus on Google results battle with writers who believe it's beneath them to be concerned with such trivialities, and nothing good comes of that. Moreover, gaming Google is an inexact science, and Google isn't very forthcoming about how best to work with it.
Rather than confronting Google collectively, publishers should work with Google collectively to figure out how to make their sites more accessible to its search engine. In a level playing field, the best articles would rise to the top, and not every top search result would necessarily come from the New York Times or the Washington Post. But that's assuming those papers start producing content that people want, in formats they want, when they want it. That's no sure thing, and if they don't, there'll be no point in blaming Google.