The topic that had them talking in the halls of this month’s Interactive Media Conference and Trade Show in Atlanta, sponsored annually by Editor & Publisher and MediaWeek magazines, was whether Google News should qualify as a news service.
This controversy arose because Google entered its news service in the 9th Annual EPpy Awards competition in the Best News Service category. (IMA has managed and marketed the EPpy Awards program since 1998.)
The EPpy judges made it a finalist, along with the more conventional washingtonpost.com and ft.com (the Web site of the Financial Times of London). Those services are considered more conventional because they are “edited” in a more traditional sense – by humans who write, edit and select stories for inclusion. At Google, there are no original stories and a software program assembles other people’s content into the Google News package. (washingtonpost.com won the award.)
Although this discussion can get fairly esoteric, its underpinnings go far beyond the academic. Google has become an awesome force in the world of Web information, preparing for a $2.7 billion IPO based on the leadership position in ad revenue generation. For the newspaper Web site executives that make up most of the delegates to this meeting, Google is both a partner (for both search and its ad partners program) and a feared competitor.
Larry Kramer, the founder and CEO of CBS MarketWatch and a career journalist, used his speech accepting the 2004 EPpy for Outstanding Individual Achievement to draw a sharp contrast between software-based aggregators and sites that collect, write, edit and present news. He said that CBS MarketWatch succeeds because of its diligent and discerning editorial staff.
But the editorial staffs of the print product have always subsidized newspaper Web sites. And the most successful newspaper Web sites, such as nytimes.com, washingtonpost.com, and wallstreetjournal.com, have annual profits in the $10 million range – nothing that would command a capitalization like Google’s.
Whether or not the average Web reader even knows - much less cares about - the difference between Google’s software-driven news packages and the edited packages of most news Web sites was never adequately addressed at the conference. But one of the best sessions on content included a demonstration of rich media editorial by MSNBC’s Jonathan Dube.
Dube took the audience on a tour of truly interactive, game-like applications that have undeniable news value. The best of those was a game that demonstrated the pressure and difficulty of being an airport baggage inspector by simulating the conveyor belt X-ray system and challenging the player to make the right decisions inspecting the baggage, complete with unruly passengers complaining about the inconvenience.
That’s one that a Google robot will never be able to re-create.
