By Chris Daly
The new Atlantic has an important piece by James Fallows. In it, he tries to bridge the chasm of suspicion and cultural alienation that exists between Google and the “legacy media.”
In short, he argues that some important people at Google are looking at the future of journalism and coming to the conclusion that if Google wants to stay in the search business, it will need great content to give people a reason to search. Who will produce that great content? Apparently not Google. But Google execs and visionaries realize that they have a stake in the success of the content-creators.
One key idea (that I spoke about last week at BU): the internet has “un-bundled” the news that once came packaged in the form of a printed daily paper or an evening news broadcast. In that model, news arrived at fixed times and it offered fixed groupings of topics and stories. If you bought the paper for sports, you got political news anyway. If you watched the evening news for politics, you got a fluffy “kicker” about some do-gooder.
In a world of on-line search, that bundling does not happen. If you want fluffy kickers, you can have them. If you want politics, you know where to find it. And so on.
The future of journalism is….. here.
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