| Google News, Yahoo, AOL and the last stand of the traditional Media -- quandrantONE |
 |
 |
| General Opinion | |
| By cho | |
| Saturday, 16 February 2008 15:36 | |
Google News, Yahoo, AOL and the last stand of the traditional Media -- quandrantONEDo you already think of Google News or Yahoo! or even AOL News as the equivalent of your national newspaper? The legacy newspapers can't be too happy about that trend.
Friday 2-15-08, in Media Firms Create ONline-Ad Network, the Wall Street Journal reported on the latest effort by traditional media to fight back: Gannet, Hearst, the New York Times Co. and the Tribune Co. are setting up a stand-alone online ad-sales network called quandrantONE. Don't be misled, this "startup" is not just about efficiency in selling web ads. In some ways it is really about how certain folks -- who have what one of ePluribus Media's Columbia School of Journalism Sulzberger program colleagues calls news DNA -- can continue to create and disseminate the news we read. Or more succinctly, it is at least somewhat about who controls the daily news "agenda" -- news folk or search engine folk. Background: quandrantONE is actually the third major attempt to create a network of legacy media corporations to band together for web search and ad revenue. The first was the aborted New Century Network, which lasted just three years and died abruptly but not necessarily unexpectedly in 1998. November of 2006 saw a second attempt where a few major traditional news corporations (acting more like sheeple than conglomerates) got in bed with Yahoo! the wolf, thinking that the joint venture would help the newspapers out of their terrible downward spiral in revenue. As reported in 176 Newspapers to Form a Partnership With Yahoo!, the news media's hopes were high:
From the newspapers' perspectives, they needed Yahoo! for the search capabilities; Yahoo! needed them for their content. The media corporations obviously saw it as a "win... win." Or as noted in the above-cited article:
Indeed, so excited by handing over to Yahoo! its content and exclusive rights to be its search engine, in April of 2007, McClatchy jumped into the same burning bed. The article Yahoo! and Newspaper Consortium Expand Ad Partnership recaps the perceived major benefits to media, as laid out by the consortium's press release:
Sounds just ducky. But then again, if, as a reader of news content, you got Google News and you got Yahoo! -- why would you want the NY Times?
And here's why the legacy news organizations should be wary of the search engine company's view of "win win": In early 2007, I happened to be in the audience for a panel of newspaper luminaries, a panel that included a representative from Yahoo! who was close to this consortium deal. When asked about it, and about Yahoo! perhaps actual paying for the content generated from the news organizations for the Yahoo! news sites, the Yahoo spokesperson said something to the effect of "Why should I pay for what I can get for free?" Perhaps it was just this display of Yahoo!'s sharp-toothed acquisitiveness that made the news organizations sit up and begin making plans to start this third network, their own service, culminating in yesterday's announcement of quandrantONE. As Bloomberg News reported yesterday:
But also, this latest attempt at an ad-sales service seems to acknowledge what senior ePluribus Media researcher Dr. Paul Thomas has surmised for some time: There are just as many dangers with having no "news" gatekeepers making qualitative judgements about what information "rises to the top" (the search engine model) as there are of having a single, all too powerful single gatekeeper as arbitrator of what is qualitatively valuable news.
Based on information Dr. Thomas sent, in my May 2007 keynote speech to the Wisconsin Associated Press Editors Annual Meeting, I wrote:
The 2004 Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) study revealed that 80% of Fox News viewers held at least 1 of three misperceptions about Saddam Hussein and Iraqi involvement with al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. The initial analysis suggested that Fox misinformed their viewers, who, the reasoning went, had they been given factual reporting, would have known the truth. Recent speculation, however, has suggested that perhaps these 80% turn to Fox because they seek confirmation of their existing biases. This possibility – that we chose the news that confirms what we already believe, coupled with the aggregators with their emerging marriages with powerful commercial interests – presents a dangerous future, where each news reader is fed stories tailored to his or her demographics and established consuming history… and so instead of a public sphere of discourse and information, we have the Amazon approach, with millions of silo’d individuals, primed to buy. All in all, it may seem such a minor gasp, that the big legacy news companies (print) banded together to try to sell ads for their web news sites. But in terms of what we average joes see as our dollop of daily news with our morning coffee, it's huge. In truth, it's a common misconception that the subscription price covers the costs of producing a paper. Subscriptions don't even come close, which is why so many free newspapers end up on your driveway or in your mailbox. Ad revenue alone pays for everything involved, from staffers' salaries, to newsprint, to delivery. For the big guys, it is Ad revenue and only ad revenue that ensures a paper can staff a newsroom, bankroll an investigative piece, or put a reporter in remote places. For those bucking the trend to cut-back "news gathers" (The New York Times announced Friday that it is cutting another 100 from the newsroom staff), it's ad revenue that makes retaining or adding staff possible. For example, Marcus Wilford of ABC World News, trying to increase news coverage, needs that ad revenue in his experiment to bring us Dana Hughes reporting regularly from Kenya as one of his 7 digital one-person "news bureaus" -- where one reporter is stationed in a remote country, ready on the ground with a digital camera and a high-speed internet connection. Still, as we surely know here, there is momentum to side-step the ad revenue model completely -- either through volunteer citizen journalism collaboratives such as, ahem, ePluribus Media or more traditional non-profit ventures, such as the Center for Public Integrity or National Public Radio. Many long-term journalists -- including Bill Moyers and most recently Paul E. Steiger who up until December 2007 was managing editor of Wall Street Journal -- have gone the non-profit route. Steiger, famous for garnering the WSJ 16 Pulitzers, has gone to head up Pro Publica, a non-profit investigative organization. Other long-term non-profit news organizations are, of course, the superlative Christian Science Monitor, the New London Day, the St. Petersburg Times, and even the tiny Anniston Star. However, each of these ventures is at the mercy of their major funder -- be it the Christian Science church, the wealthy donors behind Pro Publica, or even the U.S. Government funding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. As much as I am personally enamored by the egalitarian meritocracy of search engine "blind taste testing," I worry that what determines which stories make it to the so-called front pages of Google News, Yahoo! or even AOL is solely brokered by the biggest players -- pay for play -- and not tempered by the qualitative value of the stories to our civic and public spheres. In that regard, I'd rather have the cigar chomping news dinosaurs making the call. (For the movie version, consider David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck.) But instead, it seems that popular and revenue-generating have become the sole criteria for newsworthiness. Paris Hilton tops PTSD every time. Facing this future, it may be wistful thinking, but give me an ad network propelled by the guys with News DNA. Breaking good stories drives them as much as money drives the search-engine companies. And I'd rather have decisions made by them than by people for whom "potential eyeballs" are the only criterion. About the Author: Cho is an editor for ePluribus Media and a 2007 Columbia School of Journalism Sulzberger Fellow. Discuss this article ... If you like what ePMedia's been doing with research, reviews and interviews, please consider donating to help with our efforts.
|
