Tag Archives: google

Google’s blind spot

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Virginia Heffernan points to Google’s blind spot as a media company: they lack essential competence in the craft of editing. Her example is the disappointing presentation of the fantastic Life photo archive collection:

When Google first announced on its blog that the Life archive was up, it seemed like another Google good deed: rescuing the name of Life magazine and the glorious 20th-century tradition of still photojournalism. But Google has failed to recognize that it can’t publish content under its imprint without also creating content of some kind: smart, reported captions; new and good-looking slide-show software; interstitial material that connects disparate photos; robust thematic and topical organization. All this stuff is content, and it requires writers, reporters, designers and curators. Instead, the company’s curatorial imperative, as usual, is merely “make it available.”

What Google (and others) can do for journalism

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The ever-increasing newspaper crisis and Google chief Schmidt’s claims that there’s nothing the search giant can do that would really help, inspires Dan Froomkin to propose seven ways Google can help journalism (I would add: other actors could contribute also). I like no. 2 and 4 especially:

“* “Adopt” a handful of newspapers, and help them build technologically-sophisticated Web sites, with an emphasis on micro-local and business-to-consumer relationships. For instance, local papers need ways to database local advertising, local content, and information on local readers — then serve up ads based on psycho-graphic and geographic information. Newspapers can’t seem to figure this out by themselves. Then make the technology available to others.

* Create and endow an independent nonprofit; put esteemed journalists on its board; let them buy newspapers from owners who are wringing them dry and run them as nonprofits.

* Create an open-source journalism wire service, hiring excellent laid-off reporters to do great narrative and investigative work that’s free for the picking.

* Fund a short-term project to hire laid-off journalists from across the country, connect them virtually with hot programmers, and see what they come up with.

* Create a journalist-mediated repository of citizen journalism. Hire professional journalists to “accredit” excellent citizen journalism and train citizen journalists.

* Create “endowed chairs” for bloggers who can then quit their day-jobs and do actual reporting as well as blogging.

* Contribute to nonprofit journalistic ventures and foundations, i.e. ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity – and NiemanWatchdog.org (where I am deputy editor and where this post first appeared.)”

The Occam of blogs

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“The race is on to become the Google of blogs,” says the WSJ Online today in a very useful and informative piece on blog search tools. It’s correct, of course. If it’s one thing the web needs now, it’s a Google of blogs, or rather an Occam of blogs, that helps you cut right to the original, exciting thought or factoid you didn’t even know you needed. Sometimes the mere thought of all the millions of blogs and billions of links can be overwhelming.

Good thing then that Technorati and the others are at work sharpening their tools, as noted by a blogger with a very well chosen name.