Google in the middle
roughtype.com
roughtype.com
Google dominates its market, but it doesn't control it in the classic monopolist fashion.
Consider this thought experiment. Suppose the government, for the public good, built a service for searching the web. If they did it really, really well, would it not work just like Google, minus the ads?
The newspapers aren't being destroyed by Google. They're being destroyed by the evolution of technology. Google is just the messenger. And a pretty neutral one, as such messengers go.
(Indeed, that neutrality is one reason Google is so successful. They approach business with the intellectual detachment of scientists.)
As a thought experiment: Imagine that Google was unnecessary. Every person had a device that found exactly the page on the internet that they were looking for without using any centralized service. It just went out and scanned the whole public web in a snap. Is there a middleman now? Nope. Is it still going to kill people that choose not to participate? Yes sir!
His second point is quite accurate though: A reduction in supply of highly redundant articles will behoove journals of record. Specialization and reduction of repetitive effort will see the day through.
The issue isn't google, it's newspapers. THey are big and bulky and kill trees and there are millions of them accessible by the web now making all of them less valuable. It has nothing to do with Google and nothing to do with a middle man. Besides, lazy people can't waste time at their desk reading the newspaper, but they can stare at news.google all day.
People want the info or news, prior to the web you needed printing presses or a tv station to deliver it. This concentration of power has led to all sorts of power-crazed idiots getting involved to push their viewpoints and crowd out their opponents.
To add insult to injury they make all their money from providing eyeballs to advertisers leading to the same race to the bottom you see happening online.
I don't mean to suggest I don't search or that we are moving beyond search but trends in which we are navigating and interacting on the internet are changing.
Buchheit was over-optimistic. I'd have suggested "Be Less Evil". Then everyone would say they're doing a great job!
Carr really hit the nail on the head in his response to Shirky a few weeks ago. The issue is that there are 5000 articles on the same thing from all of these different news sites. It didn't matter when you got one of these 5000 newspapers delivered to your doorstep, but now that they are online, the 5000 stories are all in direct competition, and many of them are just thin rewrites of AP content. The smart papers will stop printing a daily paper today and start finding niches where they can provide the best content. However, the end state is clearly that we don't need so many newspapers that cover the same things.
Let's look at the currrent situation online news publishers face. Let's say I run a business news site like Business Insider and the AP has a hot story about Steve Jobs.
I have a choice:
1. Put up a 2-3 sentence post explaining why this is a great story and sending people over there. Jeff Jarvis calls this link journalism.
2. Copy and paste that AP story as an article on my site, with 2-3 original sentences above it and 5-6 below it.
3. Rewrite the story so it looks like original material even though its just a pure rewrite.
4. Find and report out an original angle on the news that the AP overlooked.
Outcomes:
If you choose option 1, your story will be deemed too short for Google News and Google search and you will lose lots of traffic. Link journalism is not a realistic option for a real business.
Option 2 and 3 are quick and easy and guarantee that your article will be "in the mix" of the 5000 articles competing for top placement for related searches in Google News.
Option 4 will get you in the mix but will put you behind the rest of the pack time-wise so you'll likely lose out on eyeballs unless you have a legitimate scoop that can itself start off a news cycle of its own.
So that's the current situation.
Now, let's take a look at the scenario you suggest:
"The Smart Papers will stop printing a daily paper and start finding niches where they can provide the best content."
Let's say you're the a Chicago news publisher cough and decide to start a site that will cover the city's South Side businesses, breaking news and politicians.
1. Yes, you're creating value and bringing new content to the web that wasn't there before.
2. Unfortunately, no one's searching for stories about what you're covering yet, which means YOU HAVE NO DISTRIBUTION. Which means you get no traffic and thus have a hard time selling advertising.
So I'm fully on board with news publishers going against the grain and covering stuff beyond whatever the day's scrum is chasing after, but unfortunately the online news audience for whatever the scrum is covering is much, much, much larger than whatever niche audience you're going to be able to get.
There are solutions of course. But right now, it's A LOT easier to get a bunch of friends together and just start rewriting AP stories about celebrities and tech companies 10-12 times a day and letting Google handle distribution than it is to go out and build a new audience in a niche.