Google’s Future Vision Of The News Sounds Great
Eric Schmidt’s vision of newspaper’s future had me nodding my head. Beyond the flashy hardware, the key concept that has me drooling is getting all your news in one place according to your preference. A personalized news aggregator.
Basically, Google News is a news aggregator. It provides links to a large variety of news sources. This makes total sense from the reader’s point of view. Instead of visiting a hundred different websites, just go to one and have everything there.
Another analogy: Netflix could be seen as an aggregator of movies. Currently, if I want to rent a movie, I know that I can just go to Netflix and odds are high it will be there. And Netflix is getting better at its personalization: recommend movies that I’d likely enjoy based on my past rentals and ratings.
So if I want to read news articles about say, Mad Men, odds are high that if I visit Google News and type in a search, I will be presented with a bunch of relevant articles from many news sources, far more than any one newspaper could provide.
The key point: with aggregation, I don’t care where the article comes from, no more than I care whether a movie comes from MGM vs. Universal. The name of the newspaper is increasingly irrelevant as the studio that makes a film. Newspapers seem to still believe their brand matters to the end user, while it means less and less, and personal relevancy matters more and more.
Eric Schmidt’s article is a case in point. I just now looked for it to create the link above. I remembered the subject of the article and who wrote it. But I forgot it came from the Wall Street Journal. And I found the article through Google News.
As a side note, some papers’ desire to move behind a pay wall seems futile. Their articles will presumably vanish from aggregators and therefore, I won’t know they exist.
Now imagine you want to rent a movie, and you have to remember the studio from whence it came (because it isn’t available in Netflix). You then have to go to that particular studio website, and then you find they want their own $9 monthly subscription? I’d give up and watch a lot less movies.
It’s shameful that Google is further along at developing a news aggregator service than the newspapers themselves. But as it took Apple to develop iTunes (which the music labels sheepishly went along with it because they essentially had no choice), some technological solution for newspaper’s dwindling readership will likely have to come from the technology world. Amazon’s Kindle, perhaps. But more likely, Schmidt’s news-reading tablet will come from Apple.
An Apple tablet on which to read Google News: that sounds great. I’d buy that in a heartbeat.