gatewatching

Shaping the future of the newspaper is an excellent source of news and think-pieces on how new platforms are affecting well… the future of newspapers.

Anyway, today there’s a piece by Erina Lin on how Google search, and aggregators like Yahoo! News and Google News, have benefited newspapers. The story smells a little of a Google press release, but it uses Hitwise data to make some interesting points, and we can use it to lead into a larger discussion.

First, two-thirds of traffic to newspapers’ websites is now driven by Google search, which explains the emerging focus on seach engine optimisation (SEO) in convergent newspaper newsrooms. This trend was explored at length in a session at the Future of Journalism conference, but I also heard a bit about it when Pippa Leary from Fairfax Digital spoke after dinner at the AMIC conference. The upshot: the subby’s art of the clever-clever headline may still be relevant for now in the print version of the newspaper, but online, keywords need to be incorporated in simple headlines to match likely searches, and drive traffic. Especially when a big story is on, the digital newsroom’s mission is getting to the top of the first Google search page, and staying there.

Second, where newspaper pros used to fear aggregators, figuring that they would discourage people from viewing the main site, they’ve worked out that they’re better of working with the “filter-keepers”. As Lin puts it:

The level of traffic Google drives to newspaper Web sites indicates they have no choice but to make their content available to Google.

Google claims that after the NYT dumped its subscription models and came on board with Google news aggregation, they doubled their traffic.

The newspapers are worried that Google may move to become a media company, and start pushing its own product. Google deny that this is on (again, the FoJ conference enabled me to hear this denial “live” from Google’s Australian jefe), but some observers point to bigger problems than this, which go to the relationship between the MSM online and any putative, independent news space.

I am aware that some of my colleagues have deep reservations about this work, but Matthew Hindman argues that Google actually militates against the “democratisation” of public speech online, because it’s search model favours big outlets with well-known mastheads, including the World’s big newspapers. On this view, Google is very good for high-profile outlets (especially “global mastheads” like the NYT or the BBC), but relatively bad for middling or local MSM outlets, let alone independent news sources, all of whom come to claim a smaller slice of the audience online than they do online.

I’ll try to summarise this concern very briefly. We know that “news” traffic and searches are a small proportion of overall web traffic. Of that traffic, only a tiny amount goes to bloggers or other forms of online independent media. Of the traffic that gets to the blogs, the vast bulk of it goes to a relatively small number of “A-list” bloggers (who Hindman points out tend to be privileged in various ways - higher degrees, professional eminence, white, male, etc.).

All of this is entrenched by Google’s search algorithms dependence on inlinks as a marker of authority - inlinks lead to better search rankings, which lead to more readers, which lead to further inlinks… None of this is helped by what seems to be a tendency towards rather cursory searching behaviours on the part of most users, and the advantages of scale that existing news organisations have over new entrants when it comes to content production.

Hindman has called parts of this process “googlearchy”. Rather perceptively, my colleague Terry Flew remarked to me that Hindman’s is the “glass half-empty” view of the operation of the “long tail” online. For Hindman, the old exclusivity of publishing and distribution has simply shifted to filtering, and Google is by far the most important player in connecting people with information. The features of Google’s algorithms are significant in shaping what news gets read, and what ideas circulate.

It could be that Marquee newspapers are coming around to Google because they’re beginning to understand that it not only guarantees them a numerically larger audience, but a proportionally larger audience share.

Like I said, not everyone agrees with Hindman, and I know that my Gatewatching comrade Axel Bruns has a lot of criticisms of his work. For mine, I think Hindman simply ignores the community-focussed nature of blogs, and doesn’t think through the possibility that although political blogs might only serve an already information rich constituency, they might still serve to extend or reframe elite conversations, with discernible effect throughout the body politic.

Still, it’s food for thought. It might be useful simply by making us think harder about the balance online between independent voices and and established mainstream outlets, especially in terms of their capacity to draw an audience. It reminds us that the blogosphere is not exempt from the MSM’s tendency to favour certain voices (if anything, Hindman claims, A-list bloggers tend proportionally to be more privileged - by education, wealth, whiteness and maleness - than journalists). It also reminds us that Google is not a neutral tool, and it does tend to favour those whose voice is already prominent. (As I was told in response to a question at the FoJ conference by Google’s representative - “We’re certainly not here to even out the marketplace”.)

But perhaps others have something to say on this - I expect that Axel might!