The veteran media writer James Fallows has delivered another landmark piece of reporting in The Atlantic Online on the efforts by Google to help the news business.
Unquestionably much is known about Google's technology that delivers news content free across the Internet. What's less well known is Google's effort to find technology to create new business models that might save the business behind that content.
Fallows investigates and finds much to report. It's a matter of mutual survival, he suggests --- Google needs journalism's success for its own. And it's not a matter of platitudes. From the top of the company there exists a drive to deliver on this initiative.
"That goal is a reinvented business model to sustain professional news-gathering," Fallows argues.
He examines such initiatives as Living Stories, Fast Flip and the evolution of advertising approaches under Google and suggests there is much more on its way.
"The fluid history of the news business, along with today’s technological pattern of Google-style continuous experimentation, suggests that there will be no one big solution but a range of partial remedies. Google’s efforts may have bought time for a panicked, transitional news business to see a future for itself and begin discovering those new remedies and roles," he concludes.
Unquestionably much is known about Google's technology that delivers news content free across the Internet. What's less well known is Google's effort to find technology to create new business models that might save the business behind that content.
Fallows investigates and finds much to report. It's a matter of mutual survival, he suggests --- Google needs journalism's success for its own. And it's not a matter of platitudes. From the top of the company there exists a drive to deliver on this initiative.
"That goal is a reinvented business model to sustain professional news-gathering," Fallows argues.
He examines such initiatives as Living Stories, Fast Flip and the evolution of advertising approaches under Google and suggests there is much more on its way.
"The fluid history of the news business, along with today’s technological pattern of Google-style continuous experimentation, suggests that there will be no one big solution but a range of partial remedies. Google’s efforts may have bought time for a panicked, transitional news business to see a future for itself and begin discovering those new remedies and roles," he concludes.
