This morning at Google’s Sydney headquarters about 80
journalists came to hear from the source, the man who is spearheading the
search company’s engagement with the media industry.
Gingras said at the outset that Google is working to foster
a healthier, open environment. “Why does Google do this?”
He said that his career has been about the evolution of
media. He worked for PBS under Hartford Gunn, and said that he had always wanted
to be on the cutting edge of technology. "Technology enables things," he
said.
Gingras said that Google is a child of the open web, and
that 98 percent of the company’s business derives from that. “That drives a lot
of our strategies.” He said that the world has changed radically in the past 20
years. “We've swapped out the central nervous system of our culture," he
said, and attributed part of the credit for this change to his company.
"We have indeed given free expression to everyone." Google, he said,
has enabled many, many more voices to appear in the public sphere.
But he thinks there is more work to do. “How do we
rearchitect the web for speed?” he asked, and mentioned AMP for ads.
Gingras said that we are now operating in a media
environment that is quite levelling, and this has had casualties. One of these
casualties has been a quantity of trust. “We see continued declines in trust in
media,” he said. He then mentioned The Trust Project.
Gingras is working with Sally Lehrman, a senior scholar on journalism ethics at
the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Santa Clara, in
California, on ethics policies. There are 90 news organisations involved. The
project is, for example, encouraging the visibility of ethics policies on news
websites. Also, media organisations should ask themselves how their journalists are made
to appear credible. Can readers access their full body of work? “People talk today
about the need for media literacy,” said Gingras. “It comes down to expertise
and motivation.” What is the journalist’s background and what is their agenda?
“I believe that journalists should be advocates and be
unbiased,” he said, encapsulating an apparently contradictory pair of
priorities in one sentence. This, for me, was the most important thing that
Gingras said during the morning’s proceedings, and it was almost the last thing
he said.
On monetisation, Gingras said that advertising is not
necessarily enough anymore, so subscriptions come into play. “We're seeing good
growth there,” he said. The New York Times has 2.25 million digital subscribers,
he said. “What can [Google] do to help drive subscription growth?” He said that
the company is looking at “the full funnel from discovery to payment”. They are
going to evolve the sampling program. He said Google is also looking for
propensity to pay among the readership, and studying how to take the friction out
of the purchasing process. It is necessary to eliminate abandonment, he said. Media
companies need to tell Google who is a subscriber so that they can be served
better during the search process. He said that it might be possible to
highlight for the reader whether an article that appears in a search result is from
a media outlet they already subscribe to, so that they can then click on it. But
he said he is cautious about setting expectations.
Part of the burden in future must lie with media
organisations themselves. “You have to be offering a product that people can
immediately see the value of,” Gingras said. “What's the value proposition?” He added however that the internet is challenging the very
foundations of democracy. “How to find consensus between conflicting points of
view?” The media has the job, he said, of building a bridge of commonly
understood facts that people can use to come to their own conclusions in any
debate.
Anita Jacoby from the Australian Communications and Media Authority asked Gingras some questions, and conducted the Q and A with the audience.
“What does journalism mean in the world?” Jacoby asked
Gingras. “How do you form an independent perspective and give people what they
need to know?”
“We're seeing far more partisanship than ever before,” replied
Gingras. “Also, a greater degree of opinion content.” Trust is based in getting
mundane things right, and in the old days newspapers had various ways to do
that, such as the weather page, the sports page, and stock market information. Back in 1980, he went on, opinion was about 3 percent of a newspaper’s content,
but now a media website may be 60 to 70 percent editorial. “Our role in search
is to give people the information they need to make their own decisions.”
Gingras also talked about the modern phenomenon of fake
news. “I don't think we're ever going to see the end of it,” he said. “Fake
news on social networks is a different thing,” he said. But: “It's one thing to
not rank content, it's another thing to eliminate it. This is legal content.”
“What is Google doing about journalists losing their jobs?”
asked Jacoby. “Google did not kill the news industry,” Gingras said. The internet
has allowed virtually free distribution. “The news industry is going through a
very, very challenging transition.” Gingras notes that the golden era of news
was disrupted by TV because when TV entered the market a lot of newspapers went
under but the ones that survived, thrived. “How are people consuming news? It's
never too soon to start innovating.”
One question that came from the audience was from the ABC. “Are
paywalls dangerous for democracy if people cannot afford to pay?”
Gingras pointed back in time to journalist I.F. Stone, who
ran a small subscription paper and who Gingras called "the original
blogger". Even though his paper was only distributed to about 10,000
people, it had a large impact in the public sphere. Stone is famous for reporting
on the Vietnam War.
“How do I succeed in this new marketplace?” Gingras asked the
audience rhetorically. “We don't live in a world with a lot of gates.” A New
York Times journalist once suggested to him establishing who was a legitimate
news source, and filtering out those results that were not from such sources. “What
the fuck!” he whispered.
Gingras (left) and Jacoby at Google's Sydney HQ.
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