Google: Is This an X Lab for Real Journalists
June 23, 2015
I have a colleague who retired. The newspaper for which he worked continued to make like interesting for those over the age of 55. I assume that other real journalists have discovered that the appetite for those born after 1950 is changing. Bring on the younger journalism grads. YouTube savvy? Great. A high traffic blog about veganism? Come on down. A Web site which is magnet for python programmers? Hey, want to work for us?
When I read “Introducing the News Lab,” I had two different thoughts:
- What a great idea
- Quite a pool of unemployed, under employed, and want to be professionals to tap
- How many publishers are like hungry bass in a big lake at a fishing tournament?
- How many journalists know how to make Google’s system sing and dance like a top billing at a vaudeville show?
According to the write up:
It’s hard to think of a more important source of information in the world than quality journalism. At its best, news communicates truth to power, keeps societies free and open, and leads to more informed decision-making by people and leaders. In the past decade, better technology and an open Internet have led to a revolution in how news is created, distributed, and consumed. And given Google’s mission to ensure quality information is accessible and useful everywhere, we want to help ensure that innovation in news leads to a more informed, more democratic world.
There you go. What about the right to be forgotten, filtering, predictive search results, and ads? Once again I am mashing up the math club’s manifesto with reality.
The idea is that the journalists embracing the GOOG will use the GOOG to produce content. I learned:
There’s a revolution in data journalism happening in newsrooms today, as more data sets and more tools for analysis are allowing journalists to create insights that were never before possible. To help journalists use our data to offer a unique window to the world, last week we announced an update to our Google Trends platform. The new Google Trends provides journalists with deeper, broader, and real-time data, and incorporates feedback we collected from newsrooms and data journalists around the world. We’re also helping newsrooms around the world tell stories using data, with a daily feed of curated Google Trends based on the headlines of the day, and through partnerships with newsrooms on specific data experiments.
The attentive reader will notice that I have removed the numerous links in the article. Clicking around in the middle of an important article is not something I do nor encourage.
Will the News Lab deliver the benefits journalists expect and the benefit some folks need? Will Google “put wood behind” this initiative or will it suffer the same fate as Web Accelerator? Will the service generate more magnetism than the many news efforts nosing into the datasphere? Will publishers jump with glee because Google empowers new content?
No answers yet.
Stephen E Arnold, June 23, 2015
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