James Fallows of the Atlantic took a look at ways in which Google is saving rather than killing the news business, writing that he is "convinced that there is a larger vision for news coming out of Google." He interviewed several Google staff for his in-depth, detailed article.

"Google's efforts to shore up news organizations are extensive and have recently become intense but are not guaranteed to succeed," wrote Fallows. He believes that Google has "undersold" its efforts in its strategy toward news companies, and that people at the top of the company have pushed hard for saving the news industry to "become an internalized part of the culture in what is arguably the world's most important media organization."

"The goal is a reinvented business model to sustain professional news-gathering," according to Fallows. At Google, he said, the question is not whether readers will pay but how and what they will pay for.

Fallows described the Google News home page as a "kind of air-traffic-control center for the movement of stories across the world's media, in real time." He interviewed Krishna Bharat, founder of Google News told him that the service shows how news organisations all tend to focus on the same stories and the same aspects of these. "I believe the news industry is finding that it will not be able to sustain producing highly similar articles," Bharat said.

Fallows stressed that the way that Google makes money is not via Google News or even informational Google searches, but when people use Google for shopping. Google's search and mail services are not necessarily money-making, but help to keep people inside Google when they do carry out commercial searches. Google maintains, however, that its interest in helping the news business comes from the fact that without good content, people won't be searching.

In Google's vision of making news sustainable, the first thing to note is that print is ignored. And a key element of the company's advice to newspapers is to continuously experiment.

Fallows discusses several examples of ways in which Google is working with news organisations: Living Stories, Fast Flip, YouTube Direct, display ads and paywalls. With regards to the latter, Google executives explained to Fallow the various ways in which they are working with publishers with regards to making different types of paywall work with search.

As conflict between Google and some publishers continues, will the company succeed in changing its reputation entirely and being part of the solution for struggling newspapers?

Source: The Atlantic