Google Throws Life Preserver to Newspapers Again

September 10, 2009

The Google assumes that users will “get it”. As a result, the company is not into bicycles with training wheels. The newspaper industry got thunked on the head with Google’s approach. Now the company has inflated a big, yellow kiddy duck and pushed it toward the newspaper industry. You can read the story in the Nieman Journalism Lab story “Google Developing a Micropayment Platform and Pitching Newspapers: “‘Open’ Need Not Mean Free”. Not much to summarize. Google is pretty good at microbilling, so in my opinion, the Google flipped some bits and inflated the yellow kiddy duck. Will it be enough? I don’t think so. Three reasons:

  1. The cost structure for news is going to be tough to “blogize”; that is, generate good info with new content methods
  2. The newspapers will find themselves competing with other folks who are generating “good enough” content, content to survive on fame, AdWords, or a sponsor
  3. Google itself has some nifty content combinatorial tools. When those are made available, software – not humans – can generate some nifty outputs. I describe some of these in my Google: The Digital Gutenberg.

So, the duckie is there, but it won’t get some newspaper publishers out of the deep end. Quack.

Stephen Arnold, September 10, 2009

Comments

One Response to “Google Throws Life Preserver to Newspapers Again”

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