On the other side of the balance, Google’s efforts to shore up news organizations are extensive and have recently become intense but are not guaranteed to succeed. Moreover, “Google” is shorthand for an array of other Internet-based pressures on the news business, notably the draining of classified ads to the likes of Craigslist and eBay.
If Google had never been invented, changes in commuting patterns, the coming of 24-hour TV news and online information sites that make a newspaper’s information stale before it appears, the general busyness of life, and many other factors would have created major problems for newspapers. Now they buy fewer than 50, and the number has fallen nonstop through those years. households bought an average of about 140 newspapers daily. The company’s chief economist, Hal Varian, likes to point out that perhaps the most important measure of the newspaper industry’s viability-the number of subscriptions per household-has headed straight down, not just since Google’s founding in the late 1990s but ever since World War II. Of course this overstates Google’s power to destroy, or create. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects.
No Spanking, No Time-Out, No Problems Olga KhazanĮ veryone knows that Google is killing the news business.
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