Google: A New Physics for the News

Over the past year, at the most senior level of the company, Google has been quietly pursuing an extremely significant effort to figure out how to improve Google News and also sustain good journalism at a time many fear it could all but disappear.

Last week, one of the people involved in this project, Senior Advisor Richard Gingras, took some of the work the company has been doing public, sharing it at the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) conference in Las Vegas. As reported by journalist Pam Maples on her blog, he explained that Google crawls around 40,000 news sites globally every ten minutes. By aggregating the resulting content, Google then sends “several hundred million” monthly visits straight back to the same news sites.

As those who have studied their online traffic patterns are aware, a very large percentage — probably around half — comes via search, mainly from Google. This pattern, which is universal across the web, renders a media company’s homepage much less significant than was the front page traditionally to a newspaper.

Gingras echoed Google executive Marissa Mayer in advancing a novel theory — that the “atomic unit” of the news has changed. The analogy they offer is how the mp3 altered the atomic unit of music from albums down to individual songs. So, for news providers, “It’s not about your site, it’s about the article,” Gingras explained.

In a followup conversation  today, he elaborated on this point to me: “We can all learn a lot from Wikipedia here.  They collectively have reinvented the encyclopedia as an extremely comprehensive set of living resources, such that they now achieve high search rankings and  large amounts of traffic for many current event topics (e.g. 2001 Anthrax Attacks). So Wikipedia is doing living resources and newspapers are continuing to do ephemeral, here-today-gone-tomorrow article pages — one of the last vestiges of edition-oriented publishing.”

Gingras believes that news providers need to rethink how they structure their online content. He urged maintaining important stories as the type of “living” entities found at Wikipedia.(Although many publishers do this for topics like the elections, or the Olympics, Gingras advocates a more aggressive approach involving a much greater volume of content.)

Furthermore, he believes newspapers are undervaluing one of their core assets — their professional reporting staffs and methodologies — by rarely sharing with users who these people are, and how they get their stories.  Gingras says one current focus of his work is how to help Google identify the original source of all news reports, as well as how to promote original reporting, including investigative reporting, in the future.

Gingras’s work is consistent with the stated priorities of CEO Eric Schmidt, who has said publicly that Google has a “moral imperative” to help the newspaper industry survive, primarily by helping to establish new business models. In this context, Google News has created the platform where each new “atomic unit” of news content has the opportunity to rise to the top of the largest search engine in the market. At that point, monetization should hardly be rocket science.

(Note: Richard Gingras has been a friend and colleague of mine in a variety of web ventures, including Salon and Excite@Home, over the past 13 years.  I’ve been informally advising him in this venture over the past year.)