The Internets were aflutter with responses to Google CEO Eric Schmidt's remarks about how Google probably couldn't save newspapers.
Let's not focus so much on the "paper" aspect of newspapers, but the news part. News organizations, thanks to cutbacks and a faltering economy, are less able to serve the public by providing in-depth, across-the-board coverage.
Often other organizations step up to plug the hole. The AP and Reuters did it in the latter part of the 19th century; today Spot.us and GlobalPost (Boston Globe story here) are stepping up. I was a beneficiary, like Spot.us, of the Knight Foundation, working with MTV's Street Team '08, providing political coverage from Kansas. It showed me what an amazing thing a foundation like that can be for journalism and innovation.
Mark Hamilton and Dan Froomkin (and many others, I'm sure) ruminated on Schmidt's comments. Froomkin suggested several ways Google could help news(papers), including endowing a chair to bloggers, adopting newspapers and contribute to non-profit news organizations.
All interesting ideas, but I'm going to suggest another angle.
Create fellowships at newspapers, where news organizations hire journalists to beef up local coverage, paid for with Google's fellowship dollars. Google could denote certain topics these fellows would cover, say public education, and require an application and review process from both news organizations and potential fellows. This would allow news organizations to examine areas where coverage is lacking or has fallen victim to cutbacks while allowing them to grow staff, coverage and authority in those areas.
Perhaps this could even turn into the open-source model Froomkin writes about. Google fellows' content could be distributed for free across the country to other organizations. Of course, giving content away for free may have gotten us where we are today. But that's where we stand.
Many have criticized Google for aggregating content, but that's what it does best. We can take advantage of that, and companies like Google, Craiglist, Yahoo and others that taken us into the information age can give back to the people they serve.
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4 comments:
Twitter is by far a better news source then any news website. People don't want to read long news articles, time is of the essence nowadays, and short real time news info is by far more valuable then any flowery journalist news source.
Sure, Twitter is great for disseminating and sharing news, but don't you think there's something to be said about in-depth, comprehensive and consistent reporting?
What news orgs are lacking b/c of cutbacks is the manpower necessary to build relationships, dig through databases and do thorough reporting -- which, by the way, can be done in easy to digest ways. A great example is the NYT's interactive graphic mapping out the Blagojevich scandal.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/12/09/us/20081209_corruption.html
Thanks for reading.
I think that be a journalist and have the opportunity to get an interview with one of these important CEO manager is one of the thing that will mark your life!
What a I think is that Google is the most perfect organization I've seen because they know how to mange their employees and also how to manage their applications.
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