I consigli di Google agli editori

Copio e incollo qui alcune parti di un lungo interessante articolo (Editor & Publisher, 9 aprile 2013) circa il rapporto tra giornali e Google:

Globally, newspaper readership has declined by some 20 percent. Last year, Google raked in nearly $43.7 billion — more than print advertising in newspapers and magazines combined.

Richard Gingras is Google’s head of news and social products. With roots in television, Gingras’ work in online services reaches back to the beginning of interactive media in the U.S. He has shaken up “old media” by likening newspapers to outdated Internet portals such as AOL and Yahoo. Unless print publishers can adapt to the Web — rather than fight it — they are doomed, Gingras has warned.

“Sometimes, I think folks in the news industry like to comfort themselves by thinking that somehow we’re going from a transition from one point of stasis to another, and then it’ll all become cozy again, and we can sit back and breathe easy for another 50 years,” Gingras said in an October 2012 seminar at Stanford. “That’s clearly not going to be the case — things are going to continue to change.”

TV threatened newspapers, too
In January, Gingras spoke at Arizona State University, stressing that old models for revenue, content, and storytelling need to be completely rethought, rather than merely transformed, for the news business to thrive in the digital age. “As long as one thinks transformationally, you limit your capabilities because you limit yourself,” he said. “It doesn’t work. Worse than not working, it becomes self-defeating … We really do need to rethink everything.” An example of that thinking is lack of innovation when it comes to story pages online. “It stuns me that 15 years in, we’re still seeing story architectures mimicking the traditional architecture of print,” he said.

The Google exec shared data that explained how the introduction of television in 1949 took advertising dollars away from newspapers, causing the loss of some local newspapers. This contraction resulted in monopoly or near-monopoly papers that suddenly became hugely profitable.

“They went from fighting for every ad dollar to having near monopolistic control over local ad pricing,” he said. “They had tremendous distribution leverage and used it to their fullest advantage. The open distribution of the Internet destroyed that leverage, but the openness of the Internet also brought the potential for many new voices.”

Gingras told that media organizations need to re-engineer the ways they gather and distribute news, and the way they do business. They need to change their strategies at the rapid pace that the digital world changes.

Still, Gingras acknowledged that it’s not easy to turn those opportunities into profit. News sites are caught in the middle of a highly competitive market for online display advertising, and Google itself is now a multibillion-dollar player in the display ad world.