Running notes from the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) and the Society for Newspaper Design annual conferences, which are being held concurrently this week in Las Vegas.
Richard Gingras, a senior adviser to Google, begins this APME session by making it clear he’s never been a journalist. (He has helped launch some news products.) But he’s come to reinforce CEO Eric Schmidt’s recent statements that Google intends to be friend, not foe, of newspapers.
Schmidt drew quite a bit of attention a few months back when he said the company has a “moral imperative” to help newspapers figure out new revenue models.
Gingras says Google shares one of the main concerns of editors: How to stimulate and sustain original reporting during these times.
At Schmidt’s request, Gingras has spent the past year looking at many aspects of our industry — from website traffic patterns and evolving business models to ways to help make public records easily accessible. He shows a few slides about trends that are well-known in this crowd: Reliance on print, television and radio for news is declining, while use of online sources is growing. About half of most newspaper websites’ traffic comes in through sources other than the homepage — primarily through search.
Gingras explains the key factors that contribute to a high search ranking in Google. One of the most important is page rank, which evolves mostly from links that drive people to a site.
He points out — a couple of times — that Google News does not monetize its pages directly and sends traffic (about 700 million visits per month) to news sites. He says Google is trying to figure out how to more quickly surface on Google News significant, exclusive stories done by newspapers.
Google crawls about 40,000 news sites all over the world every 10 minutes. “Our definition of a news source is something that is of constant debate internally,” Gringas says. Google looks for sites that have some editorial process behind the content, as well as an organization behind them “so we can feel the information is credible.”
Finally, Gingras urges editors to take a lesson from Wikipedia’s redefinition of the encyclopedia.
Although it has no original reporting, Wikipedia is becoming a popular source for news. To illustrate this, Gingras shows a recent Google search on the anthrax attacks. The first result: a Wikipedia article. The second: The site of a man who has been researching and following the case for several years. People are going to these sites, and referring others to them, in large enough numbers to drive them to the top of page rankings, he says.
The Wikipedia article is nearly 5,000 words and also has multiple sources linked. On big news stories, Gingras argues, Wikipedia’s contributors usually go a good job of pulling together a lot of reliable material — often from newspaper sites — and updating it continually.
He offers a premise: the atomic unit of news content has changed. That’s what happened with music. Until a few years ago, the atomic unit of music was albums. But with the development of mp3, it became the song. “It’s not about your site, it’s about the article,” Gingras says.
He is echoing recent comments by one of Google’s top executives, Marissa Mayer, vice president of search and user experience. Mayer is co-chair of a panel convened by the Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute to propose ways to help American communities meet their information needs.
He believes newspapers can capitalize on their ongoing coverage of certain topics by rethinking how they structure content online. Don’t make users go into an archive to read your paper’s past coverage, he says. He urges editor to create “living stories or topic pages,” that have stable (standing) URLs. The web rewards URL stability, improving page rank, placement in search engines and, in turn, this creates stronger sharing and engagement with the content. (He acknowledges not every story is worth this effort.)
And leverage the value of who you are, he tells the editors, by giving the audience information about the editorial process, the backgrounds and prior work of reporters. “People don’t understand journalism … Give the public some indication of how you do your work.”
