Why Nick Carr is wrong on Google as a middleman for news
After seeing recommendations on Twitter from Clay Shirky and others, I was expecting a tour de force from author and former Harvard Business Review editor Nick Carr, but I confess that I found his post on Google as middleman — and its effect on newspapers — disappointing. Not just because the middleman comparison is one that has been made repeatedly over the past couple of years, and therefore doesn’t really add much to the conversation, but also because I think he is wrong. Or rather, I think that his description has some merit, but the lessons he draws are flawed, and ultimately unhelpful for newspapers (I would have put some of these thoughts into a comment, but Nick says he has disabled comments on his blog because they are too distracting).
Is Google a “middleman made of software,” as Nick describes it? In many ways, yes. And as he points out, entities that act as middlemen in a market typically act in their own interest. But what about his third point, in which he says:
The broader the span of the middleman’s control over the exchanges that take place in a market, the greater the middleman’s power and the lesser the power of the suppliers.
I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding here. The broader the control that Google has over the exchanges that take place in a market, the greater its power — but that power doesn’t lessen the power of Google’s suppliers. If anything, in fact, it amplifies it. Does Google indexing my website, and providing a link to it when someone searches for my name, lessen the power that I have over my content? If you think of power as control over who sees the content and where, then yes. But in reality, it provides me with far more reach than I could otherwise achieve on my own, by exposing that content to people.
Does this perception of Google as middleman, stealing traffic and eyeballs from newspapers, really hold water? I don’t think so — and Nick doesn’t provide any real evidence to the contrary. After all, if you search for news about something, Google doesn’t show you anything but a bunch of headlines and excerpts from stories at newspaper websites. How can that simple act be seen as demolishing the business model of newspapers? As far as I’m concerned, if your headline and lede paragraph are the sum total of the value you are providing for readers, then you deserve to lose your business to Google.
So what is Nick’s prescription for success? He says the industry needs to reduce supply, both by getting rid of newspapers and by imposing (or trying to impose) controls on syndication of news articles around the Web:
Once the news business reduces supply, it can begin to consolidate traffic, which in turn consolidates ad revenues and, not least, opens opportunities to charge subscription fees of one sort or another… With less supply, the supplier gains market power at the expense of the middleman.
In other words, the very thing that Associated Press appears to be trying to do by cracking down on unlicensed syndication and by trying to renegotiate their deal with Google somehow (for a good summary of what they’re doing, see the AP’s somewhat self-serving FAQ, as well as Peter Kafka’s piece at MediaMemo). This seems to me like a dead end, both for the AP and for newspapers as a whole. Trying to artificially re-create the kind of scarcity that papers used to enjoy — something that was a function of the control they had over a distribution mechanism, more than anything else — is a mug’s game.
Newspapers should spend less time trying to disempower the middleman known as Google, and more time trying to think of ways to add value to what they do, and building relationships around their content that Google can’t possibly compete with. In reality, Google is the single biggest source of marketing for their content — a service it provides for nothing. The biggest problem with Carr’s post is that it is only going to encourage the “fight Google” mentality that has caused so much distraction in the industry already.
What’s fascinating about Carr is how often he is wrong while sounding right. It’s possibly this talent, buttressed by his earlier credentials and lack of humility, that has seen him increasingly employed in a manner that scientists are for industry: to discredit obvious truths by advancing plausible lies.
He has been wrong on most of what he’s become known for—how we think in the age of search ubiquity, publishing models and schemes, etc—and yet we have to endure his armchair strategy on topics where the logic appears to be “I am not so much right as I am employed.”
Google isn’t making us stupid. Carr, on the other hand…
Mathew,
With all due respect, I think you misunderstand Nick’s argument and the fundamental issue with Google. It’s not about whether Google sends you traffic, or whether you have control over Google sending you traffic, or whether more traffic is generally a good thing.
The issue is how much money you can make from that traffic. Every content site on the web is competing for a slice of a pie that has a lot LESS money than the traditional media pie and a lot MORE content providers taking slices of the pie.
Google, on the other hand, makes money off of every slice.
The problem for content sites is there’s not that much money to be made in receiving traffic. Where there’s money to be made is in controlling the flow of traffic, i.e. controlling distribution. The more content there is, the more the value of content declines, and thus the more the value of receiving traffic declines — but the more valuable high quality distribution becomes.
It’s basic supply and demand. Nick’s argument is econ 101.
Google isn’t stealing anyone’s content or anyone’s traffic.
Google is stealing their control over distribution. That’s why Google keeps making more money while everyone else keeps making less.
Thanks for the comment, Scott, but I’m not misunderstanding anything — I get what Nick is talking about, and I understand that he (and you) see Google’s “control” over distribution as a bad thing, because apparently it allows Google to make money but no one else. I just don’t think that’s true — nor do I think (as Nick does) that newspapers can somehow put the genie back in the bottle and recreate the kind of scarcity and control over distribution they used to enjoy. Not only can’t they do it, I don’t think they should.
Thinking about the newspaper business as something that involves controlling distribution is a mistake. Media outlets should see Google as a distribution partner, not a competitor. The fact that newspapers can’t make as much money from the traffic Google sends them as they could from newspaper ads isn’t Google’s fault — it’s a sign that the traditional newspaper business model has to change. Trying to recreate that paper model on the Web thru paywalls and licensing restrictions is a fool’s errand.
“Once the news business reduces supply, it can begin to consolidate traffic, which in turn consolidates ad revenues and, not least, opens opportunities to charge subscription fees of one sort or another… With less supply, the supplier gains market power at the expense of the middleman.”
That’s tough for me to wrap my head around. It’s almost like Carr is expecting news organizations to build their own Googles to index their own information.
Ignoring the fact that the paid model ship has sailed, Carr’s position is utterly anti-Internet. Missing from the argument for pay walls is the explanation of what happens afterward. You’ve got to convince people to pay for something that the day before was free. We’re talking about content that is worth more in terms of value to the reader, than the free stuff was.
News is already expensive to put together — what happens when you’ve got to make the expensive product a lot better, just to justify people having to pay for it?
Google’s position as middleman, however, is interesting. And it may be short-lived. I’ve talked about the eventual rise of local and regional news aggregators. It will happen. And when it does, there will be a shift.
For the time being, though, Google does have some power over the content it aggregates, but it’s mostly subconscious. Content generators want Google to index their content, so they work to ensure it’s interesting enough to actually deliver traffic via Google. But that’s minor because it’s mostly SEO-related.
In sum: I agree with your argument and disagree vehemently with Scott and Nick.
Matthew: your point about distribution is important since it underscores the challenge (and opportunity) of moving from less complex to more complex systems. Like biology, fitness is awarded to increasingly niche organisms because they increase the efficiency of the entire system. The same is true in the post-grid/Google era. Google may have “scooped” everyone by assuming the central nervous system position, but they boost circulation to specialized activities and enable them to operate at smaller and smaller scale: we go from the Times to Politico to Umair Haque. (Give me a Haque-like thinker for most “news” categories and you can dispense with the noise of thousands of journalists—and their associated fees.)
Carr IS lecturing about economics 101, as Karp points out. But the bell rang, the class has changed, and the kids are hacking stem cells from skin samples. Time to move on.
This might offer an interesting insight:
http://www.cepr.org/pubs/Bulletin/dps/dp1538.htm
Google is the middleman because they offer real value for users: they offer a comprehensive source of reference, just like retail store offer a one-stop option for most goods. Could newspapers have done the same? They had a head start — but their arrogance prevented them to understand that readers wanted points of view, not a single line. Google News recommendation of opposing views makes so much sense: why don’t newspaper try the same? Why the NYTimes refuses to offer a Somalian point of view on piracy at the end of the article (industrial fisheries, extreme poverty, foreigners’ dispise)? And more importantly, concentration is a problem? Coming from the very institution that made every newspaper more of the same, that’s tough love. Do we really need more then eleven thousand point of view on the stupid act of an upset man — none, *none* who witnessed it, nor talked to the involved parties? If concentration means getting rid of the 99% of journalists who think that they job is playing Copy-Paste, I can’t see the problem.
If anything, it’s not Googlet killing investigative reporting: those who murdered it are the editors-in-chief who didn’t realize that this was their only added value, and that the rest of the copy-pasting could easily be read elsewhere.
nope. you’re wrong and nick’ right. this is about who ultimately makes the real money here. kudos to google for figuring out a great business model but it’s absurd for apologists to try and white out the blunt facts about the power of this very powerful middleman.
Thanks for the comment, Scott, but I’m not misunderstanding anything — I get what Nick is talking about
Mathew, I’m the “Nick” you refer to, and having read your post three times in an attempt to figure out where your argument might intersect with my own, I have to tell you, in all honesty, that Scott’s right: you misunderstand my argument. The interest of a profit-seeking (and cost-generating) online news outlet is to concentrate traffic at its site in a large enough volume to actually make money. The interest of Google is to concentrate traffic at its search engine while sending traffic to content sites in a highly fragmented manner. These are, at an economic level, which is the level that matters if you’re talking about good-sized public companies, conflicting interests. Scott puts it very clearly: “Every content site on the web is competing for a slice of a pie that has a lot LESS money than the traditional media pie and a lot MORE content providers taking slices of the pie. Google, on the other hand, makes money off of every slice.”
As I said in my post, there’s nothing wrong with Google’s interest (and its service is clearly of great value to a great many people), but to argue that its interest coincides with the interest of profit-seeking news sites is to misread, or ignore, the economics of the web.
Nick
Even without google, the newspaper business-model would have become a lot less profitable: the barriers to entry have completely disappeared. You buy some pre-written news, but it on a website, and you’re a newspaper. No need for writers, no need for printing.
And because readers can read newspapers from all over the world, newspapers have gotten a lot more competition.
These effects alone would be enough for profit margins to disappear. No need to blame it all on google.
sure seems like nick and scott are right. you did miss it mathew. newspapers can “partner” with google and “add value”, but if they don’t have substantial traffic their ad sales can’t sustain their costs. sure you can arguably have more valuable traffic–engagement–but that only takes you so far.
Clay Christensen describes the change from a value chain commercial model to a facilitated user network commercial model. When the world was defined by asymmetric information, the supply was limited and guarded, the econ 101 argument makes sense. Turn off the spigot of supply and prices go out. That was the Standard Oil model at the turn of the century.
But once information is symmetric, controlling information as a business strategy won’t work.
The way I look at it, there are three elements of a user network. The OEM – original equipment manufacturer. The OPM – the original product manufacturer. The VAR – the value added reseller.
The internet is the original equipment that is the infrastructure for information distribution. It is built by commercial entities AND mostly by prosumers. News-on-paper is a locally delivered original product. Everybody who wants to make money in the information business is either an OPM or a VAR.
Google is an OPM by creating a web advertising platform. To make alot of money from advertising on the web means gigantic scale. No newspaper can use CPM of CPC to make serious money, because they can’t get to scale.
So that leaves OPM- local news, and news-on-paper, invent new stuff that people want to buy and VAR, curate the appropriate news for people who are interested at that time in those stories.
Search engines (Google being by far the most prominent) do serve to expose a newspaper site’s offerings to a broader number of people. That’s beneficial to the sites, but at the same time, the search engines’ effect on the average newspaper’s market share is far from clear.
However, search engines also make it less likely that visitors will enter a site through the “front door”, probably make it less likely that visitors will be converted to repeat users, and less likely that they will view other articles on the site.
It doesn’t sound too appealing (nor practical) to suggest that newspapers collaborate to increase scarcity. However, the corollary is probably true: there are too many producers of news stories for the same news events. When that condition exists, it generally means that each individual news story has less value, all things being equal.
So, it would seem that the overall impact of search engines on newspapers may actually be negative. But whatever the impact on news sites, the search engines end up with a definite positive benefit from handling the users’ interactions with all the news articles.
I think that’s close to what Nick was saying.
Nick, I didn’t think my post was that obscure, but let me try to state it in as simple terms as possible: yes, you are right that Google is a middleman, and yes, you are right that its interests lie in showing other people’s content to users and then monetizing that through advertising. We agree on that. What we disagree on is whether this means that Google inevitably wins and newspaper sites inevitably lose.
You say that “the interest of a profit-seeking online news outlet is to concentrate traffic at its site in a large enough volume to actually make money.” No disagreement there — although I would say attention rather than traffic, which is an important distinction. You also say, however, that “the interest of Google is to concentrate traffic at its search engine while sending traffic to content sites in a highly fragmented manner.” That’s just not true, and describing it that way is a deliberate distortion.
Google couldn’t care less whether it is sending traffic to content sites in a highly fragmented manner. It displays search results in the best way it knows how, period. If your site provides the best information, it will draw a corresponding amount of traffic from Google the middleman. Both you and Scott assume — and not just assume, but take as axiomatic — that the amount of traffic Google provides is not enough (and will never be enough) to allow newspaper sites to make money.
That’s the part we disagree on. It’s not enough because newspapers aren’t thinking about their businesses properly, aren’t maximizing their value to readers properly, and are stuck (along with advertisers) thinking only about banner ads. You seem to be desperately trying to hold back the tide and retain the control — both distribution and pricing control — over content that newspapers used to enjoy, but that’s just not possible, and implying that it is prevents newspapers from confronting the reality that their business model has fundamentally changed.
I’m going to say it again: if Google displaying a headline and a few sentences of your content is enough to ruin your business model and steal all of the attention that you think is rightfully yours, then you deserve to fail.
AndreJ, that’s an excellent point. Everyone — Nick and Scott included — seems to focus on Google as the bad guy who is ruining everyone’s traditional business model, when the reality is that those models would have disintegrated even if Google never existed. All it has really done is accelerate the change. As a friend of mine likes to say, everyone blames Google when what they’re really mad at is the Internet.
Matthew,
With respect, I’m having a hard time seeing the grounds for the argument.
Perhaps if we lose the “middleman” term and replace it with “aggregator” or “trusted filter”?
For many, many years, those terms described newspapers. Papers weren’t just content creators — a large part of what they did was to bring together information from multiple sources, largely their newsrooms and wire services, but also freelancers and, in the case of conglomerates, other newspapers. Also, a huge swath of their content was user-generated, in the classified pages.
In a very real sense, the local newspaper was the internet before the internet arrived.
Where papers failed miserably was to not realize that they were, in effect, middlemen, and allowed Google and other aggregators to swoop in and own that space.
If newspapers have any chance of reclaiming that space in their local markets, they’re going to have to start thinking like aggregators again. They need to do a better job of showing local visitors — whether they come directly or through Google — that they make sense as a local online destination, with good original content and unparalleled links to other relevant local content. If I’m reading you correctly, that’s the value you talk about in the last graf of your post.
That’s it exactly, Tim. As Pat Thornton of Journalism Iconoclast said to me on Twitter, the amazing thing is that Google News draws so much traffic despite the fact that it pretty much sucks — both in terms of its content and its user interface. It shouldn’t be hard to add more value than that, and yet all we hear about is how Google is ruining everything, and how newspapers have to a) sue, b) control their content more closely or c) give up completely.
This is an indirect aspect of Google’s position – or the position of any/all massive content aggregators – but I wonder if it isn’t an important part of what we are seeing. We understand that aggregators can leverage volume in a way that content producers never can, and that this allows them to reap sustainable advertising profits. But isn’t it the case that aggregators also have an incentive to maintain advertising fees at very low levels that further consolidate the attractiveness of their web properties as ad placement solutions? Something like a Wal-Mart-ization of the online ad market where their ad-solution-fees are so low that nobody else can even afford to live in that market, let alone profit massively?
Mathew,
The issue is that newspapers and other media companies are only now beginning to realize the economic value of aggregation on the web, and that, as Tim points out, they’ve always been in the aggregation business.
The real problem is not Google but rather that newspapers no longer have control over distribution, of their content or any other content. They walked away from the aggregation business on the web — or rather they failed to recognize the opportunity.
Most of all, in the hyper-competitive web content ecosystem, no newspaper has the kind of distribution power by themselves that they did as a local monopoly.
But if news sites were to collaborate, they could create an aggregator far more valuable than Google News. There’s a huge opportunity there — the battle is far from over.
The question is, will they collaborate?
Scott, I agree that newspapers could theoretically create a pretty good aggregator if they collaborate — or AP could possibly do it. After all, Google News gets a lot of traffic despite the fact that it only has headlines and first paragraphs. Imagine what kind of traffic a site could get that provided a lot more value.
What I disagree with Nick about is the idea that newspapers have to (or even can) somehow return to a situation where they controlled and restricted distribution, and recreate scarcity in any meaningful sense. Papers should use Google, not try to do an end-run around it, or pretend that the Internet and its effects on the distribution of content can somehow be undone.
What I found intriguing about this post was its breathtakingly blithe dismissal of copyright and intellectual property rights enforcement as an attempt to create artificial “scarcity.” If Google’s business model dilutes the value of the content it aggregates and distributes to the point that the survival of the content creators is threatened, it’s the current bounty of information that’s artificial, not the old scarcity.
Ralph, I didn’t bring up copyright or intellectual property rights in this context because they are irrelevant. Not only are they the wrong way to try and artificially create scarcity, but they have little or nothing to do with Google and how it handles news content. Not only is that use pretty clearly covered by fair-use principles, but newspapers have a simple tool for stopping it if they wish: it’s called the robots.txt file. The fact that papers don’t use it means they have effectively given their approval to Google, and in fact many of them see Google’s indexing of their content as a benefit (as they should).
The problem here seems to do less with Google and more with the internet. Once upon a time, newspapers were the choke point for information. No longer. Now the information pie is bigger––and that is a VERY VERY good thing. Google creates value by helping us navigate the information pie. Newspapers tend to dig up information really well but leave it to bloggers to add value through analysis and, more importantly, have ceded their role as aggregators (because the nature of aggreagation has changed)
Question: As a user, where do you go to find a one-stop shop for news? Your local newspaper website, or Google News/Drudge/HuffPo/etc? Why?
People need filters in this world, and the more targeted those filters are and can be, the more valuable they will be to consumers, be they readers or advertisers.
All this said, I don’t think this debate we’re having will make much of difference in the long run. It’s a Darwinian world out there––newspapers are gonna start dying soon. The industry will contract. The dinosaurs will die off, and in their place will rise the mammals. You can waste a lot of time trying to teach a brontosaurus to be a lemur, but nature will ultimately have it’s way. The internet naysayers and throwbacks here will ultimately reap the fruits of their labor––and die. C’est la vie.
The dinosaurs will not save us, nor will they save themselves.
More important than trying to save the wheezing newspaper industry as it exists now, is to invest time and money into the young and healthy news orgs of the future––the TPM’s and Politicos and HuffPo’s of this world.
Don’t waste money on the terminally ill––just give ‘em pain meds and call it a day.
I agree with the general thrust of your argument. What I don’t understand is why newspapers aren’t moving quickly to add value to the service that google provides by layering other technologies on top of the core indexing engine. This would add value and (potentially) increase traffic and attention. Just because
Google is the leader in search doesn’t mean that others can’t provide better solutions that complement and/or replace what Google offers. I’ll draw an analogy to payments in banking. As payments have moved from paper to electronic banks (and retailers etc.) have increasingly wanted to control the payment experience because this allows them to add value to the experience (through advertising, value added payment services etc.). It doesn’t mean that they’re going to get into the clearing business or the network business. But the more stickiness they can have around the transaction the greater potential for them to make money.
I disagree with the comments that this has to be local though. Why is that? If you have valuable services and content then there’s no reason for it to be constrained to being local.
Kim,
Points well taken.
My guess is that newspapers have evolved in a monoply situation so they are having a hard time to see themselves as value added distributors of the news. In the past if there was a content value it was with the columnists or the “scoop.” But NYTimes Select seems to have demonstrated that even the NYT columnists lose more than they gain by charging for access. And “breaking news” has drifted to the web.
The recent announcement that newspapers are going to try to sell multipart stories in the form of a an ebook is very interesting. It allows them to monetize the long tail of their content. Since the marginal cost is essentially zero, and the cost of production and distribution is essentially zero, that should find a small but profitable market.
I think it has to be primarily local because only local will attract local advertisers. I hate to keep playing my one note but, print ads for local business is a proven revenue stream. It’s a huge underserved market that has the ability to bring new money into the game.
MIchael J.
The ebook concept is interesting. I’m not disputing that local won’t be good for newspapers but that they needn’t be limited to it. The interesting concept of ebooks (value added content) illustrates that newpapers could find a new business model in specialty content. I also think they could extend the long tail (and attention/stickiness) if they would start building communities around this. Leveraging what Google already does well may help them not hurt them if they do.
Several people have said essentially the same thing, not only here, but in other reactions to Nick Carr’s original article, and that is that newspapers need to provide a reason for customers to come to them first. If that happened, whether they were ad-supported or subscription-supported is a secondary question.
My top three sources of news — the sites and sources that I visit every single day — are, in order:
* http://www.groklaw.net/
* direct email from Good Morning Silicon Valley (http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/)
* http://www.theregister.co.uk/
Do you see the pattern? They’re all “local” in some sense, and they’re not syndicated. Each of those sites provides me with relevant, interesting, and well-commented articles that I can’t find anywhere else, including Google.
I only turn to Google News to find details on breaking headlines. For any such headline, as Nick pointed out, there are thousands of articles. But the vast majority of those thousands of articles are just syndicated copies of one single story.
Nick says
“Syndication makes sense when articles remain on the paper they were printed on. It doesn’t make sense when articles float freely across the global web.”
That makes perfect sense to me. If you write an article that you hope to get people to pay for (directly or indirectly via advertising), you don’t get the money by giving the readers ten thousand possible places to read it when you only get paid if they read it on your site in particular. Now, if each of those ten thousand sites pays you to host your article, that may help you a little bit, but it probably won’t help those sites draw more traffic to themselves. A successful news site needs to provide a compelling reason for their audience to be faithful. That doesn’t happen if when the audience can find the exact same articles on thousands of other sites.
Matt Mireles wrote:
“More important than trying to save the wheezing newspaper industry as it exists now, is to invest time and money into the young and healthy news orgs of the future––the TPM’s and Politicos and HuffPo’s of this world.”
Really, Matt? These young, vital sites you love rely primarily on content generated by the “dinosaurs” that you believe will soon be extinct. What will these young sites do then?
Ralph Rannalli is likely right that it is the current bounty of free, high-quality news content that is artificial. We are in a transition period. The web is currently not generating enough revenue (on a per-content provider basis) to sustain the production of high-quality news. We will inevitably see fewer sources of quality content and more pay content.
Kim-
I think we agree. Local should really mean community or tribe. An ebook version of a multipart story on Iraq would find readers all over the country and the world. IMHO, I think it would find a lot more readers if it were put out in a paperback version and sold to high schools to study current events.
The importance of local is more from the largest potential source of new revenue. Local business who has been locked out of newspapers because of cost and an arcane sales process.
One possible way of adding community (not necessarily location based) and value would be to moderate comments. I still enjoy reading the Wall Street Journal online, but the comments are a total wasteland. With most blogs, the comments are a treasure trove. I understand why Nick turns them off, but the WSJ and the NYT should be moderating comments and creating an atmosphere for very high quality discussion (not unlike what’s happening right here, right now — no self-aggrandizement intended).
Michael,
I agree that we agree on some of the basics. I still think there’s value in adding value to original high quality content whether it’s local or global. Creating communities of interest is the goal.
I also agree with Bill Richardson that there has to be some model for creators of high quality original content get paid for their work. That may come as the number of creators diminishes. Or you may have a model where original producers syndicate their content using a “cable-like” model. Anyone could pick that content up (NYTimes newswire API for example) and add value to it.
Moderated (and ranked) comments (like Disqus for example) that Curt Carmack suggests could be one. Deeper content like the policy wiki that the G&M put up a while ago could be another. Etc. etc. The point is that in providing value add you get the attention/stickiness and focus that may drive more valuable ad revenue and/or services that customers might subscribe to.
google is also made of hardware, more than for example microsoft. the company holds a technical copy of a large part of the web on its own servers.
the news industry does not need to reduce supply, as there is still a high demand for news, it needs to reduce redundancy of content. if every headline article across a number of newspapers contains the same information it might still make sense on your local newspaper but not anymore when you try to make a difference online. diversification, opinion pieces or investigative journalism could be a solution.
I see little mention here or in the Carr article about the distinction between BIG media like the New York Time, Wall Street Journal, AP, Reuters etc, and the thousands (or is it hundreds now) of local papers around the country (and world).
Isn’t it commonly accepted that eBay, Craigslist and other Internet properties took away much of the need for running ads in local papers? Google is hardly to blame for that dynamic.
Don’t you think that the Internet (in general) is also eating into the business of “Yellow Pages” publishers, Encyclopedia publishers, hard-copy map publishers? I’ve seen everyday evidence of all of these things and don’t see how you can thoughtfully separate the plight of the “newspaper industry” (which I see as multiple things) from that of other paper-based businesses.
I’ve never been less happy with the quality of the mainstream media as I am today. One question I have is whether the quality is actually less, or was it bad all along and the huge variety of alternative sources is just now showing it up for what it is.
For a newshound, there is value in having a trusted source summarize the important points from a congressional hearing, a White House press conference or a commercial companies product announcements. Ohhhh, but don’t go viewing those original materials yourself on C-Span, or government or corporate web sites, because you will most certainly be disappointed with that summary that you used to think was good enough.
Dan Rather, Jason Blair and a few other notables have awakened many people to the extent to which news can be manufactured out of thin air or a journalists imagination and has also made many more sensitive to how our opinions can be manipulated even by journalists who lace their stories with a few facts.
I don’t know that Google is the cure for bad journalism, but it certainly hasn’t caused a problem that was well underway before Google even existed.