By Rick Edmonds
It's not a brand new thought, but hearing Google vice president Marissa Mayer say it at Sen. John Kerry's hearing Wednesday
was chilling: the "atomic unit of consumption" for news, going forward,
will be the single article, not an assembled newspaper, magazine or Web
Site.
And Mayer did not shy away from the
corollary. If the article stands on its own as content, "it also
requires a different approach to monetization; each individual article
should be self-sustaining."
Now here is the part
that gets really ugly. Mayer concedes that "these types of changes will
require innovation and experimentation in how news is delivered online
and how advertising can support it." Meanwhile, news organizations and
reporters should feel grateful for the table scraps Google tosses its
way via clicks to their sites from Google Search and Google News.
There
is plenty wrong with this picture. It's self-aggrandizing, since Google
Search is the huge beneficiary of article-specific advertising. It is a
formula for bankrupting the news organizations and pauperizing the
reporters and editors who produce the "robust and independent
journalism" to which Mayer's testimony gave lip service.
And
at a minimum, this new order of things would skew coverage to topics
that have a natural advertising base (health and fitness, for example)
and away from top-tier civic and investigative reporting.
I
don't think Mayer's formulation about the atomic unit of consumption is
exactly right. Even in an article-driven world a brand like The New York Times and maybe your hometown paper may confer what she calls "authority on a particular topic."
However,
thinking about whether the article now trumps the publication nicely
captures the divide between old-style and new age news consumers. The
oldsters not only like the crinkle of paper as they read over morning
coffee, they like how the editors have assembled and ordered the news
(and that goes for NPR and the nightly network news as well).
The
wired-up crowd range from indifference to contempt for the assembly and
selection (a.k.a. gate-keeping or "lecturing"). They enjoy putting
together their own picture of what's going on, perhaps blogging and
tweeting on matters of personal interest and drawing on social networks
for ideas on what is worth a look.
Mayer believes
that making the article paramount has "powerful consequences" for how
it is prepared. "The publisher must assume that a reader may be viewing
the article on its own, independent of the rest of the publication. To
make an article effective in a standalone setting requires providing
sufficient context for first-time readers, while clearly calling out
the latest information for those following a story over time."
I
agree with Mayer that reading an article should not be like walking in
during the middle of a complicated movie, and online reading provides
some good opportunities for contextualizing and deeper dives that
traditional formats do not. And there is plenty of room for
improvement.
On the other hand, writing stories
that make sense on their own has always been good practice, certainly
back to the ancient times when I was learning the craft. Making running
stories easier to follow in newspapers was one of the lead findings of
the Readership Institute of Northwestern's Media Management Center in its first report in 2003.
So the craft part of Mayer's take on news is palatable. The business model is hard to swallow, as the proud Boston Globe glimpses
mortality, Tribune Co. newsrooms are gutted and experienced news
professionals have more than ample reason to feel obsolete. Maybe this
is Google's information world, and the rest of us just live in it.
But
Mayer's testimony strikes me at a minimum as tactless and, at worst, an
endorsement of creative destruction run amok. It smacks of the famous, if embellished, Vietnam-era saying (before Mayer's time, to be sure), "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."
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