Google’s Creeping Journalism
What a luxury to be able to respond directly to a news story about you or your organization. Google recently announced a system allowing such responses on their Google News blog:
We’ll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question.
MediaPost discusses the potential conflict here between Google and mainstream news outlets. What exactly is Google doing? Are they now a news outlet? Will they employ journalists who will actually pursue the reactionary soundbite and edit it for publication?
I realize Google is becoming the everything to damn near everyone, but this move seems to me to be a huge jump away from what is, according to Google’s Company Overview webpage, their mission:
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Where does it say “creating information”? Google is search. Google is online applications. Google is search-based advertising. Google is, well, according to this Google page, Google is lots o’ stuff, and it’s adding more stuff every day.
I remember a time when another company that made its bones in search decided to expand into a cloud of features and services, diluting the brand it had solidified. It became the everything to damn near everyone. And then Google showed up and kicked Yahoo!’s ass. Does anyone else feel like they’re listening to Justin Timberlake? “What goes around, comes back around…”
Megabrands can, for a time, get away with breaking some of the 22 immutable laws of branding, simply because the train is rolling so hard and fast. But I’m a firm believer that you can’t get away with diluting the brand to something indefinable. If you get into the information creation business, Google, it may well end up hurting your brand.
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Wes Alwan said,
on August 14th, 2007 at 10:28 am
One way to look at this: Google is merely adding a social networking feature to a content syndication service. Of course the distinguishing feature here is that Google will have to carefully vet comments to make sure they come from sources genuinely involved in stories. In other words, they will indeed have to get into journalism. This is complicated by the fact that news stories are rife with sources whose primary objective is publicity. It is also typical for sources to feel betrayed and misrepresented even by positive stories (i.e., they weren’t positive enough, or sources feel manipulated after the fact into saying things that any decent person would know are off the record, despite the fact that you put them explicitly on the record at the beginning of the interview). Even beyond the issue of branding, Google has opened a can of worms here: some news organizations already resent being scraped (er, at least in Belgium: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601204&refer=&sid=ax2kjV7VdHEY). Now they will be getting scraped by a content syndication machine that has added an active journalistic component. And then there is the inevitable fact that they will be creating a battleground for “misquoted” sources, PR people, and other spinners to try to achieve with Google News Comments what they failed to achieve with their less-than-gullible interviewer.
In the end, it’s also an exciting idea, and perhaps too hard to resist once it’s occurred to you (and when you have a Google News infrastructure to back it up).
Of course, the blogosphere is abuzz with this announcement:
Bruce Clay has some interesting comments on this “can of worms”, especially concerning the issue of how they are going to deal a) comment editorial decisions and b) comment moderation, including dealing with the truckloads of spam that afflict even minor blogs: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2007/08/comments_in_goo.html
Adario Strange at Wired Blog Network worries further about the editorial implications: will any comment by a source be published? Will journalists be able to respond to comments by sources? http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/08/diggle-rising-g.html
Blogoscoped points to the possibility of the dilution of well-founded investigative reporting by spin-meisters: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-08-08-n65.html
Searchengineland has a very useful Q&A with Google Product Manager Josh Cohen, verifying that indeed reporters and story subjects as well as sources can respond; that Google will not moderate comments except to verify they come from valid sources; and claiming that this doesn’t put Google into the content-creation business (”We don’t want to create content, and we don’t want to be in the content creation business. We want to be the conduit connecting people with information.”): http://searchengineland.com/070808-191446.php
Ars Technica claims that this puts Google firmly in content creation territory, and worries about the implications for news companies and brands: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070808-who-needs-journalists-google-news-to-let-newsmakers-comment-on-stories.html
Micropersuasion talks about the inherent risk for Google: http://www.micropersuasion.com/2007/08/google-news-now.html#comment-78764682
More on the implications for PR professionals: http://www.prweek.com/us/news/article/731254/Google-source-feature-draws-mixed-reviews/