It’s a good thing Google doesn’t dominate world food production. We’d all be dead by now.
The Web giant built on innovative search algorithms does a fantastic job helping citizens of Earth (except in China) sort through a googol squared bytes of information, but it doesn’t produce any.
That’s why Hal Varian, the company’s chief economist, giving advice to newspapers is kind of like telling farmers to get their food at the supermarket the way everybody else does.
According to a report in Ad Age Digital Thursday by reporter Tasneem Raja, Varian told journalism students at University of California Berkeley that new technology such as Apple’s iPad could be a boon to publishers.
“The future of news may lie in harnessing these kinds of devices,” he said.
“The good news is online information can reach people where they weren’t accessible before — at their work desks. The bad news is they don’t have much time there to read it.”
True enough. But worse, no matter how much time they have, fewer Americans show any inclination to do the hard work required of citizens in a democratic republic to keep up with vital public issues and effect positive change.
Though the number of readers still is impressive – an online-only Adweek Media/Harris Poll released Friday shows 90 percent of Americans 18 and older read a newspaper sometimes, in print or online – those who do regularly are fewer and aging.
Forty three percent say they read daily, 72 percent at least once a week and 81 percent once a month.
To get an idea how interested Americans are in self-governance, check the ratings of President Obama’s state of the nation speech. He got only 9.1 percent, of adults 18-49 combining Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC viewers, according to preliminary results Friday on TVbythenumbers.com. Fox’s American Idol beat that with 9.5 percent all by itself.
Can mere technology overcome mindless apathy?
According to Raja, Varian told students he’s studied ad revenue and circulation data from the Newspaper Association of America, the Pew Research Center and other sources, and digital distribution will be a boon if publishers can radically redefine their product and means of reaching consumers.
He said 53 percent of newspaper spending is on printing and delivery costs eliminated by digital distribution, compared with 35 percent on “core” functions of news gathering, editorial and administration.
But news gathering and editorial are “core” areas traditional media cut recklessly over the past 20 years to sustain false profits as revenues flattened and fell.
One result is the audience for news declines. He said newspaper circulation slipped since 1990 and plummeted in the past five years. But those readers have not shifted online. Only 39 percent of Internet users surveyed by Pew said they spent time online looking for news from any source.
“The challenge is, how can we make newspaper reading a leisure-time activity again? We know reading the news is valuable to our customers, but they don’t spend much time doing it.”
They have googols of other fun stuff to read, watch, play and chat about. News is soooo boring. Ohmygod, it’s hard. You have to think!
The fact is people don’t believe they should pay for news, at least not much. Newsday’s recent “paywall” experiment drew 35 online subscribers.
Things are getting worse. A Pew News Quiz just out shows “Only 42% of Americans answered at least six questions right, compared with 71% who answered at least half the questions correctly in March 2009.”
Advertising revenue that once supported reporting and editing now is spread electron thin among a myriad media, channels, sites and venues. “Pure news is the unique product that newspapers provide, but it is very hard to monetize,” Varian said.
It’s also very hard to gather and expensive even using journalists whose calling requires long hours for low pay, meager benefits and retirement plans that count on early mortality.
Studies show even significant advertising volume captured by news Web sites generates about 10 percent the revenue of equivalent print and broadcast business. That free-market ratio won’t support many journalists, even impoverished ones.
So what? Well, like farmers who grow what everybody feeds – and profits — on all the way up the food chain, journalists go out and get the original hard news everybody else searches for and bloviates about all the way up the information chain.
Without them it all must collapse eventually. Again, so what?
If Varian wants an example of how well Google will fare in an America devoid of tough, smart, committed independent journalists all he has to do is consider the fun his company is having in China, where the government is happy to be the only source of news. And citizens are happy, too, or else.
Or he could look right next door to Oregon where fewer than 20 percent of the people just inflicted ruinous taxes on the most productive citizens and businesses in the state because most of the populous were misinformed or oblivious.
The fact is technology and market dynamics have disrupted one American industry – as so many others – that happens to be fundamental to all that we are as a nation.
Fortunately citizens and organizations such as the Franklin Center are trying desperately to fill that void.
So, thanks for the advice Mr. Varian. But Google should do more than give advice to those who actually do produce. Google should produce something.
Hire some journalists, help out those who do, or eventually starve along with the rest of us.
