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Readers want articles, not newspapers

Marissa Mayer, the vice president of search and user experience at Google, spoke earlier this month at a US Senate Committee hearing on the future of journalism. Her address was particularly interesting as it revealed Google’s point of view on journalism and on how Google has changed consumption habits.

Mayer made her main contribution to the hearing when she addressed disruptive effects the web has on media production and consumptions, very well explained by the concept of “atomic unit of consumption”.

Emerging media often disrupt the atomic unit of consumption of existing media. Mp3 files, for example, allowed consumers to buy individual songs rather than a whole album, as they would’ve in the LP/Cassette/CD era. In the same way, the atomic unit of consumption for news has shifted from the whole newspaper to the individual article.

Users often read articles online without going through the website’s homepage. They may come directly from a search engine or a link on another website.

This is a complete game changer. If the article becomes the basic unit of consumption, it has to be written and framed to be self-sufficient. Publishers have to see this sea change as an opportunity to engage their audience, for example by suggesting other content based on the content readers have already viewed.

Throughout her speech, Mayer spoke about web search as a way to connect people with the news they’re looking for. She talked about how search helps professionals to find more relevant content. It enables them to add their works to the conversation. She said Internet represents challenges and opportunities for journalists and journalism.

Google News has been cited as a great tool to help users find news relevant to them, thanks to an algorithm that considers freshness, location, relevance and diversity of content. This allows Google to populate a live newspaper of sorts, unbiased and rich with diverse perspectives.

Google Search allows users to find news on their own, but Mayer says Google also takes content ownership seriously. If a publisher doesn’t want their content to be indexed and found on Google, they can simply use metatags to exclude it, this giving huge control over content “findability”.

Google creates economic opportunities for journalists and publisher, Mayer said. She talked about the AdSense program, which allows content producers to monetise their website’s traffic.

I have to say that I slightly disagree on this point. While AdSense is indeed a great source of revenue for a few huge media outlets, it is earning peanuts for the average blogger or journalist, especially in this economic downturn that saw online ad value plunge.

A very useful tip discussed in this hearing, finally, is not to generate different articles about the same story. Many news sites create different articles as the story develops over time, instead of updating a single article page (with a single URL). Using the single page model (as Wikipedia and The New York Times do) allows the article to grow in authoritativeness and gain position in the search engine result page (SERP), instead of fragment it in different pieces.

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Flickr images from users erikso and allyebag

Tags: google, internet, internet search engine, link, marissa meyer,

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