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False AI Obituary Spam The Latest Symptom Of Our Obsession With Mindless Automated Infotainment Engagement

from the that-you-click-is-all-that-matters dept

Last month we noted how deteriorating quality over at Google search and Google news was resulting in both platforms being flooded by AI-generated gibberish and nonsense, with money that should be going to real journalists instead being funneled to a rotating crop of lazy automated engagement farmers.

This collapse of online informational integrity is happening at precisely the same time that U.S. journalism is effectively being lobotomized by a handful of hedge fund brunchlords for whom accurately informing the public has long been a distant afterthought.

It’s a moment in time where the financial incentives all point toward lazy automated ad engagement, and away from pesky things like the truth or public welfare. It costs companies money to implement systems at scale that can help clean up online information pollution, and it’s far more profitable to spend that time and those resources lazily maximizing engagement at any cost. The end result is everywhere you look.

The latest case in point: as hustlebros look to profit from automated engagement bait, The Verge notes that there has been a rise in automated obituary spam.

Like we’ve seen elsewhere in the field of journalism, engagement is all that matters, resulting in a flood of bizarre, automated zero-calorie gibberish where facts, truth, and public welfare simply don’t matter. The result, automated obituaries at unprecedented scale for people who aren’t dead. Like this poor widower, whose death was widely (and incorrectly) reported by dozens of trash automation sites:

“[The obituaries] had this real world impact where at least four people that I know of called [our] mutual friends, and thought that I had died with her, like we had a suicide pact or something,” says Vastag, who for a time was married to Mazur and remained close with her. “It caused extra distress to some of my friends, and that made me really angry.”

Much like the recent complaints over the deteriorating quality of Google News, and the deteriorating quality of Google search, Google sits nestled at the heart of the problem thanks to a refusal to meaningfully invest in combating “obituary scraping”:

“Google has long struggled to contain obituary spam — for years, low-effort SEO-bait websites have simmered in the background and popped to the top of search results after an individual dies. The sites then aggressively monetize the content by loading up pages with intrusive ads and profit when searchers click on results. Now, the widespread availability of generative AI tools appears to be accelerating the deluge of low-quality fake obituaries.”

Yes, managing this kind of flood of automated gibberish is, like content moderation, impossible to tackle perfectly (or anywhere close) at scale. At the same time, all of the financial incentives in the modern engagement infotainment economy point toward prioritizing the embrace of automated engagement bait, as opposed to spending time and resources policing information quality (even using AI).

As journalism collapses and a parade of engagement baiting automation (and rank political propaganda) fills the void, the American public’s head gets increasingly filled with pebbles, pudding, and hate. We’re in desperate need of a paradigm shift away from viewing absolutely everything (even human death) through the MBA lens of maximizing profitability and engagement at boundless scale at any cost.

At some point morals, ethics, and competent leadership in the online information space needs to make an appearance somewhere in the frame in a bid to protect public welfare and even the accurate documentation of history. It’s just decidedly unclear how we bridge the gap.

Filed Under: engagement, google, information, journalism, obituary scraping, obituary spam, public welfare, quality, reporting, search, seo, spam

Progress: An Honest Criminal Turns Himself In After Learning He's Wanted Via Vanity Google Search

from the baby-steps dept

You know, we talk a great deal at Techdirt about dumb criminals and how often they are nabbed by the intersection of their own stupidity and technology. It is, frankly, enough to make you wonder about the future of our species, watching these would-be criminal masterminds fumble about social media, YouTube, and the like. I remember the days when criminals had a certain sense of honor. Sure, they did wrong, but they had a certain something to them.

Well, perhaps that breed of criminal isn’t dead yet, judging by Christopher Viatafa, the Palo Alto man who did a vanity Google search for his own name, saw that he was a wanted man, and promptly turned himself in.

Google Christopher Viatafa and with no digging at all you’ll find he’s wanted by San Leandro police. That’s exactly what the 27-year-old Palo Alto man discovered this month. The first result of his search led to the Northern California’s Most Wanted website, where his picture appeared along with the charges he’s facing, authorities said Friday. Accused of doing wrong, authorities said Viatafa then did what was right: He turned himself in to police.

In a world filled with criminals who brazenly use technology to act like jackasses, this is apparently what passes for a breath of fresh air. Viatafa appears to be no saint, having allegedly peeled off a couple of caps after an argument at a party (no injuries/deaths reported), but at least he went to face his charges after finding out just how badly the state wanted him.

So fear not for our future, because some bad guys who shoot guns will apparently use the internet to turn themselves in. Or something. Actually, I’m not sure any of this is really making me feel much better.

Filed Under: google, honest criminal, search, wanted list

Dear Google: People Like You Because You're Not A Walled Garden; Please Don't Put Up Garden Walls

from the thanks dept

Wil Wheaton is getting some attention for highlighting what appears to be a pretty ridiculous trial balloon on the user interface design of YouTube: requiring users to be signed in to a Google+ account to up or down vote a YouTube video.

Now, it appears that this is just a test, but just the fact that Google is thinking about it seems like a bad idea. Wheaton makes the point pretty clearly: even though he’s a regular Google Plus user, he knows that this will decrease overall engagement:

Oh, go fuck yourself, Google. This is just as bad as companies forcing me to “like” something on Facebook before I can view whatever it is they want me to “like.”

Just let me thumbs up something, without forcing me to “upgrade” to G+, you dickheads.

The worst part of this? For a producer like me, I’m going to lose a crapton of potential upvotes for Tabletop, because the core of my audience is tech-savvy and may not want to “upgrade” to yet another fucking social network they don’t want or need.

At this point, it’s well known that Google is betting heavily on Google+, but it may be overplaying its hand. A key reason why people like Google is that it didn’t seem heavy-handed on such things in the past, and focused on having as open and permissive a solution as it could. Yet, in this case, it appears to be doing the opposite just to drive more (unwanted) usage toward Google Plus. Of course, the reality is that people who don’t want to sign up for it won’t sign up for it… and that will just lead to less engagement. And that’s probably exactly the opposite of what Google really wants.

If you feel the need to force your users into using your own social network, perhaps you’re doing it wrong.

Filed Under: google, walled garden, wil wheaton
Companies: google, youtube

A Gallery Of The SOPA Blackout Protest Screens.

from the mr-smith-takes-over-the-internet dept

Needless to say, there’s a pretty big protest going on right now against SOPA, with many sites either shuttering fully or making obvious changes in support of the protests. Leading the charge are Wikipedia, Reddit and Google. Sites like SOPA STRIKE and SOPA Blackout disseminated code to allow sites to easily join the blackout, but many sites have actually decided to take the time to tailor their protests for their own sites, which is amazing to see. It is this creative energy that drives the Internet and makes it what it is (for better or worse), and it is this very energy that legislation like SOPA and PIPA threaten to extinguish.

I’ve created a gallery of SOPA blackout screencaps, but here are some of my favorite takes on the protest today:

Reddit’s blackout is probably the most complete; all URLs, including deep links, on Reddit lead to the blackout page, which is very impressive for such a largely trafficked site. For Redditor’s going through Reddit-withdrawal today, they feature a handy countdown timer on their blackout page.

Wikipedia’s blackout encompasses all of the English site, and as evidenced by @herpderpedia (who is collecting various angry Tweets about the Wikipedia blackout), it is certainly causing some frustration (and hopefully some awareness). That said, Wikipedia’s blackout is very, very, very easy to thwart (just hit the ESC key before the page fully loads), so there’s an easy escape valve for those that are in dire need of its content. In that same vein, Craigslist’s full blackout also has a release valve that gracefully loads after a few seconds.

Google promised that it would do “something,” and followed suit with a Google Doodle, essentially blacking out its logo in protest. Several sites followed suit, including Hacker News, 4chan’s /b/ (link to a SFW screenshot), and TwitPic.

Taking the “censor-style” protest to the next level are Wired’s blackout and Daily Kos’ blackout. Wired’s coders decided to mark up the page itself with black censor boxes, so that the page looks like it’s been through the hands of some very aggressive government censors. Very clever from the design-minded folks over at Wired.

Elegant as always, xkcd’s blackout offers the simple message, “[don’t censor the web]”.

And, the most amusing blackout of the day comes from McSweeney’s (of course), who has handily replaced its site today with “A DAY’S WORTH OF FACTS TO GET YOU THROUGH WIKIPEDIA’S 24-HOUR BLACKOUT.”

Check out the full gallery here, and let me know if there are any awesome blackout implementations that I’ve missed.

Filed Under: blackout, censorship, copyright, google, pipa, protect ip, reddit, sopa, wikipedia, wired

Google's Next Victim? British Intelligence Services

from the killing-industries-before-killing-industries-was-cool dept

Google is at it again. Not content to singlehandedly destroy the motion picture, music, news and road map industries, Google’s all-seeing eye, combined with its search engine, is now threatening the livelihoods of British intelligence agents, who will now be expected to tell their superiors “something they don’t already know.”

According to Sir David Pepper, former director of the UK Goverment Communications Headquarter, the “Google effect” of having so much information available online has “substantially raised the threshold for producing intelligence for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.”

“Nobody wants the easy stuff anymore and there is no point spending effort and money collecting it,” said Sir David, who was giving the annual Mountbatten Memorial Lecture at the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

“Many of the sort of things for which [officials] once would have turned to the intelligence agencies are now readily available to them online,” he said.

“Thanks to Google Maps and Streeview anyone can today see photographic detail of far away countries which hitherto would have been available only through secret and highly sophisticated national satellites.

“Intelligence producers have had to become very sensitive to this phenomenon and very careful not to put effort into producing intelligence that purports to be secret which is in fact not secret at all.”

Now, not only is it going to be tougher for spies to outspy Google, but results will now be expected to compete with Google’s famous fractions of a second.

Sir David Pepper also said “the Google effect” meant that officials who use secret intelligence were demanding it quicker than ever before.

“If the intelligence readers are used to getting information online very fast they’re going to expect the intelligence agencies to be able to do much the same thing,” he said.

It’s not all bad news, however. The “Google effect” can also be used for good, rather than just as a tool to put industries out of business.

But online information was offering opportunities as well as challenges to those in the espionage trade, Sir David said. “You can find out a lot about potential spies without ever meeting them, simply by looking at their online footprints,”* he said.

*(Henceforth referred to as the “Facebook effect.”)

Filed Under: google, intelligence, search, uk

Can Google Get Past The Big Faceless White Monolith Stage?

from the up-the-customer-service dept

I’ve discussed in the past that one key area, which I think has been Google’s Achilles heel, is its customer service. To most outsiders, Google comes off as something of a big, white monolith. When things go wrong, it’s often nearly impossible to reach someone there, or to get any sort of actual contact with a human being, who is trying to help. We’ve argued in the past that if Google doesn’t fix that, it’s a huge opportunity for a competitor. I’ve been told that people inside Google recognize that this is an issue, and that they’re really trying to fix that. In fact, one of the things that has really impressed me about Google’s latest social networking play, Google+, is that it’s actually afforded Google an opportunity to show this in action. A bunch of folks at Google have used Google+ as a way to make the company seem much more human, accessible and responsive. I was pretty amazed that the few times I’ve mentioned bugs or problems with something in Google+ that often within minutes Google employees responsible for the project would respond and be quite helpful.

However, it looks like Google is definitely still sorting through some problems with this — and being responsive on Google+ alone won’t satisfy those who aren’t on Google+… especially if Google has completely locked you out. A guy named Dylan wrote up quite a complaint letter to Google detailing how the company completely shut down his account — which he used for just about everything — and then all he could do was face the big, white monolith with every attempt to figure out what happened and get his life back.

On July 15 2011 you turned off my entire Google account. You had absolutely no reason to do this, despite your automated message telling me your system ?perceived a violation.? I did not violate any Terms of Service, either Google?s or account specific ToS, and your refusal to provide me with any proof otherwise makes me absolutely certain of this. And I would like to bring to your attention how much damage your carelessness has done.

My Google account was tied to nearly every product Google has developed, meaning that I lost everything in those accounts as well. I was also in the process of consolidating everything into my one Google account. I had actually thought through this a few months ago and determined Google to be a trustworthy, dependable company. So I had imported all of my other email accounts, hotmail, yahoo, etc., into that one gmail account. I had spent roughly four months slowly consolidating my entire online presence, email accounts, banking info, student records, etc., into that one Google account, having determined it to be reliable. That means in terms of information, approximately 7 years of correspondence, over 4,800 photographs and videos, my Google Voice messages, over 500 articles saved to my Google Reader account for scholarship purposes (a side-note: when I closed my original Reader account to consolidate everything in my one reliable account bearing my name I re-saved several hundred of the articles myself, by hand, one by one to this new account. The one you have closed and from which I have now lost all of the articles.) I have lost all of my bookmarks, having used Google bookmarks. I had migrated my bookmarks from computer to computer, a couple hundred of them, for maybe six years and I finally uploaded them all to Google bookmarks, happy to have found a solution to migrating them and happy to be safeguarded from their loss. I have also lost over 200 contacts. Many of which I do not have backups of. I have also lost access to my Docs account with shared documents and backups of inventory files. I have also lost my Calendar access. With this I have lost not only my own personal calendar of doctor?s appointments, meetings, and various other dates, but I have also lost collaborative calendars, of which I was the creator and of which several man hours were put into creating, community calendars that are now lost. None of the calendars were backed up either. I have also lost my saved maps and travel history. I have also lost in my correspondence medical records and a variety of very important notes that were attached to my account. My website, a blogger account for which I purchased the domain through Google and designed myself, has also been disabled and lost. Do you really think I would knowingly do anything to jeopardize that much of my personal and professional information? And I am sure as the days continue I will realize other things that Google has destroyed in their unwarranted disabling of my account. I am only too angry right now to think straight and realize them all. Why anyone would entrust anything to ?The Cloud? after what I have gone through is completely beyond my ability to comprehend.

His description of the “help” he got from Google’s preferred customer support system, it’s forums, seems all too representative of how the company has dealt with customer service in the past:

I?m not upset that Google would put my account on hold if they think it was compromised, but I am absolutely furious that they would disable my account without notice, without giving me a reason, and without giving me any way to re-enable it, and then ignore all of my attempts to speak with someone. No other online service provider behaves this way. I understand that Google can?t offer support for every little thing, but when a company like Google has monopolized sectors of the internet they need to demonstrate some responsibility to their customers when things like this happen. I have exhausted the help forums. And that has only made me much angrier. I will not bother to quote the nonsensical exchanges I have had, there are too many and they will only aggravate me further. The breaking point came when a ?Top Contributor? moved my thread from the original help forum in which I posted it, into another forum without my permission. Then a few days, and 34 responses, later, another ?Top Contributor? posted that my thread was in the wrong forum and closed the conversation, thus preventing me or anyone else from posting to it or making any more progress. The user forums are not the informative places that Google may think they are. And the only time a Google employee posted in my thread was to say that my question was in the wrong forum, and to tell me that I should have posted in the forum that it was originally posted in. This came after being asked over, and over, and over again the same questions. Here?s an example:

ME: Please help me my account has been disabled and I don?t know why. USER1: Just log into your dashboard and do [something.] ME: I can?t, my account has been disabled. USER2: Hi I just saw your post. Can you log into your account and tell me what [something] says? ME: NO, I CAN?T LOG INTO MY ACCOUNT. USER1: OK calm down, can you do [something which required me to log in]? ME: NO! I CANNOT LOG INTO MY ACCOUNT!!!!

After four days of this I nearly gave up, until another ?Top Contributor? stopped by to mention that my thread was in the wrong forum and I should have posted it in another forum, the original forum that I had posted it in. Then the conversation was closed by someone and I gave up, after five days.

Dylan appears to have spent much of the day alerting people to this story on Twitter. And hopefully it’s working. I saw that Google VP Vic Gundotra has replied to Dylan saying:

You bet on Google. We owe you better. I’m investigating.

Other Google employees have also said that they’re trying to figure out what happened as well. I imagine things will get fixed before long, but it’s unfortunate that Dylan had to go through this at all.

But, of course, fixing Dylan’s situation and making sure it doesn’t happen again are two different things. I am hopeful that Dylan’s experience will make more people at Google realize what an issue this is for many people, who rely on the company.

Now, obviously, some will point out that (a) there are ways to back up many of these things (though, perhaps not all) and Dylan did not do so and that (b) many of these services are free (though Dylan has paid for extra storage and some other things via Google). In some ways, just as you were always told to “backup your hard drive” in case it crashed, today you’ll have to “back up” your cloud data in case Google or someone else randomly shuts you off.

But I still don’t think that’s a reasonable excuse. Google has created a ton of excellent and useful products (some of which are world changing), and I’m impressed with how much more responsive and human the company seems to have become via Google+. But it still needs to figure out how to be human when it comes to customer service. I recognize that Google’s culture is about being as algorithm-driven as possible (just see this story about its venture investing process), but some things really do need a human touch. I know that plenty of people inside Google realize this, but until that becomes evident in how it handles customer service issues, it still seems like a key weakness for the company.

Filed Under: customer service, google
Companies: google

Facebook Bans User's Ad Campaigns For Displaying Google+ Ad

from the all-i-see-is-sand dept

There’s a longstanding myth about ostriches that, when frightened, they will bury their head in the sand and pretend the danger isn’t there. This, of course, is ridiculous. Such horribly unadaptive behavior would have been bred out of the species by the evolutionary process (or by whichever God you believe in tweaking his code a bit) as hungry African predators would have delighted in seeing stationary feathery meals. See, that isn’t how you behave when you’re threatened. You don’t just pretend like the threat doesn’t exist.

Unless you’re Facebook, of course.

As reported by CNET, apparently a user of both Facebook and Google+ wanted to cross-pollinate his social networking farms and, since Facebook is still the more fruitful territory at the moment, decided to take out an ad with Facebook to get folks to add him on Google+. These two are, of course competitors, currently vying for users attention and loyalty. Apparently Facebook believes the best way to do that is to not only block this gentleman’s Google+ ad, but all of his ads on Facebook. The notice he received?

Your account has been disabled. All of your adverts have been stopped and should not be run again on the site under any circumstances. Generally, we disable an account if too many of its adverts violate our Terms of Use or Advertising guidelines. Unfortunately we cannot provide you with the specific violations that have been deemed abusive. Please review our Terms of Use and Advertising guidelines if you have any further questions.

In other words, we’re banning your ads because we’re banning your ads. The CNET article tries to dig into Facebooks advertising TOS, but basically comes up with nothing other than that they reserve the right to ban for any reason including promoting competing products.

So Facebook, embroiled in a war to win the hearts and minds of internet users, is pretending that the war doesn’t exist. There is no Google+, at least not in Facebook-Land, where everything is milk, honey, and Farmville requests. We know why ostriches didn’t evolve this kind of behavior.

So what’s going to happen to Facebook if they keep their heads firmly entrenched in the sand?

Filed Under: advertising, bans, google
Companies: facebook, google

Judges Allowed To Use Google To 'Confirm Intuition' In Cases

from the well,-there's-that dept

One of the more controversial posts we’ve had recently concerned the discussion about whether or not jurors should be allowed to use the internet to do research related to a case they are hearing. It seems like most folks here were very much against it, though I think it’s something worth exploring in more detail. But, let’s take this question a few steps across the courtroom. What about judges? In a recent appeals court ruling, it was found that it’s okay for a judge to use Google to “confirm his intuition.”

The case involved a bank robber, and a question over whether or not he violated the terms of his release by (you guessed it) robbing another bank. There was a question over what the robber wore that resulted in the Googling:

Chin reviewed several pieces of evidence, including a bank surveillance video showing a robber who wore a yellow rain hat. A yellow rain hat was found in the garage of [Anthony] Bari’s landlord.

Noting similarities between the hats, Chin at a hearing said he resorted to Google Inc’s search engine for help. “We did a Google search,” and “one can Google yellow rain hats and find lots of different yellow rain hats,” he said.

While that single point seems to favor the suspect, in providing some bit of reasonable doubt that the yellow rain hat alone proves who it was, the judge, Denny Chin, felt that there was enough overall evidence, and sentenced the guy to three years in jail. However, because of that Google search, Bari appealed, saying this violated federal rules of evidence. However, the appeals court had no problem with it:

In its decision, the appeals court said most federal evidence rules “do not apply with their full force” in proceedings to revoke supervised releases.

Using this “relaxed” standard, it endorsed Chin’s effort to confirm his “common sense supposition” that more than one yellow rain hat is available for sale.

But it went further, saying improved broadband speeds and Internet search engines cut the cost of confirming intuitions.

The court said that 20 years ago. “a trial judge may have needed to travel to a local department store to survey the rain hats on offer. “Today, however, a judge need only take a few moments to confirm his intuition by conducting a basic Internet search,” it added. “As the cost of confirming one’s intuition decreases, we would expect to see more judges doing just that.”

I’m curious to see if the same people, who were horrified at my suggestion that Google searches for juries might not be such a horrible thing, feel the same way in the case of a judge. Because one of the key points raised in the discussion here was that “rules of evidence” were concrete and could never be messed with — and even suggesting that the concept might be due for an update was pure blasphemy. Yet, here it seems that an appeals court recognizes that modern technology may change how rules of evidence can work.

Filed Under: evidence, google, intuition, judges
Companies: google

Google To Newspapers: Experiment, Experiment, Experiment

from the there's-money-to-be-made dept

The Google Public Policy Blog recently posted a summary of a speech by Chief Economist Hal Varian on newspaper economics. Alongside the we-are-not-your-enemy message that Google is hoping newspapers will someday listen to, it contains useful insights on the challenge of succeeding as an established print publication in the digital world. Varian suggests a few potential courses of action, but the real value of the piece is that it highlights the obstacles in a way that can be tackled by experienced insiders—especially marketers and salespeople, which newspapers employ in abundance but often fail to set free on experimental strategies.

One of the first things Varian establishes is the volume and value of online news readers, and then he looks at the difficulties of turning that value into revenue. The numbers may be discouraging for newspapers, but they could also become the basis of several important short- and long-term goals in an online strategy:

“Visitors to online newspaper sites don’t spend a lot of time there. The average amount of time looking at online news is about 70 seconds a day, while the average amount of time spent reading the physical newspaper is about 25 minutes a day. Not surprisingly, advertisers are willing to pay more for their share of readers’ attention during that 25 minutes of offline reading than during the 70 seconds of online reading. So even though online advertising has grown rapidly in the last five years, it appears that somewhat less than 5% of newspapers’ ad revenue comes from their internet editions, according to the most recent Newspaper Association of America data.

There’s a reason for the relatively short time readers spend on online news: a disproportionate amount of online news reading occurs during working hours. The good news is that newspapers can now reach readers at work, which was difficult prior to the internet. The bad news is that readers don’t have a lot of time to devote to news when they are supposed to be working. Online news reading is predominately a labor time activity while offline news reading is primarily a leisure time activity.”

Varian talks about the need to increase leisure involvement with online news, and in the full speech, he lists ways this might be done: leveraging new technologies like smartphones and tablets, developing more engaging formats for journalism (like Google Living Stories, which recently went open source), and creating multimedia experiences.

These are all important ideas, but to some extent, they miss an opportunity by focusing on ways to get people reading at home instead of work: namely, don’t at-work readers have value too?

For a long time, newspapers have used “business purchasing influence” as a prominent reader statistic in media kits. But we now live in a world where business purchasing influence is a much more distributed thing, hardly limited to managers and IT folk: employees at every level in every field make use of online services to expedite their work. Web services subvert the top-down model of corporate IT, allowing workers to seek out the tools that work best for them. These services usually have freemium models, with prices that suit small departmental budgets, and since there’s no software installation there’s no need to involve IT staff.

Think web lockers (plenty of companies still have laughably low email attachment limits). Think Flash-based presentation tools (graphics departments hate PowerPoint). These are bottom-up business services: a few employees get free accounts, a few more get on board, and before you know it a whole department is more than happy to pay a monthly fee for such a useful tool. These are the companies that want to reach people at work, during those 70 seconds they spend reading a news story while wondering how to transfer a 50-megabyte PDF.

There are some other excellent parts of Varian’s post, including a look at the goldmine vertical markets which have traditionally sustained newspapers: automotive, travel, home & garden and the like (he oddly fails to mention real estate, which is a biggie). These are the same verticals that sustain Google’s search advertising—the problem is that the end market is now specialty sites, not news publications. Though Varian doesn’t discuss the possibilities, this is an area where newspapers still have a chance: they should be leveraging their community respect while partnering with specialty purchase sites through advertising and affiliate programs, ensuring that they continue to be an important link in the chain. TechCrunch recently reported on a Forrester Research study that estimates that web-influenced offline sales in the U.S. (purchases where the consumer made their decision online then went to a retail store) are worth nearly a trillion dollars, and news websites should absolutely be a part of that.

It’s well worth reading Varian’s post in full, but in the end, his core piece of advice is what counts:

“In my view, the best thing that newspapers can do now is experiment, experiment, experiment. There are huge cost savings associated with online news. Roughly 50% of the cost of producing a physical newspaper is in printing and distribution, with only about 15% of total costs being editorial. Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the internet.”

That really is the core of it. Newspapers must experiment with new ways to report the news, new ways to engage their readers and new ways to get advertisers on board, while embracing the fact that their readers are switching to a medium that costs them less. There are over 70-million Americans reading news online—if newspapers can’t turn those eyeballs into money, someone else will.

Filed Under: experiment, google, hal varian, newspapers
Companies: google

Why Don't Newspapers Realize That Google's Handing Them Quality Leads

from the not-paying-indeed dept

A bunch of folks have been sending in Scott Rosenberg’s wonderful response to those who keep incorrectly claiming that Google is somehow to blame for the decline of news, and should “pay” newspapers. The whole thing is worth reading, but there’s one key message towards the beginning: Google is providing newspapers with “qualified leads,” normally considered the most valuable type of leads in any sales operation. These are people who actually want what a newspaper is offering… and rather than thank Google for sending them such qualified leads (and figuring out ways to provide enough extra value to have anyone want to pay, the newspapers are whining and complaining about this process.

Filed Under: google, journalism, leads, newspapers
Companies: google