On 31/7/20 4:40 pm, Karl Auer wrote:
... opportunity ... to set up a news search service ...
Such a service would need media companies willing to cooperate, which is not easy.
The Australian Associated Press (AAP) has operated for 85 years, but recently the cooperation between media companies and willingness to pay has been lacking: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-29/aap-newswire-service-sale-finalised-nine-news-corp/12404748
If Google doesn't want to pay multiple media organizations, they could subscribe to AAP, or buy it.
How much is the news content from traditional media companies worth to digital platforms? Do users of social media really value accurate factual news reports on public issues? If the customers just want gossip then there is no business case for Google and Facebook to pay for hard hitting investigative journalism: users can generate the gossip themselves.
James Marcus recounted in his book "Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut" how he wrote book reviews for Amazon. But Amazon then starting selling things other than books and publishing customer reviews. Amazon found that customer reviews were just as effective for selling and there was no need to pay experts to write reviews. https://blog.tomw.net.au/2006/02/lost-in-amazon-jungle.html
Journalists have never wanted to admit that their job is to fill in the gaps in the newspaper between the advertisements. If a media organization could find a way to sell advertising without news, they would, as ads make the money. The digital platforms have, in effect, worked out how to do that.
-- Tom Worthington, MEd FHEA FACS CP IP3P http://www.tomw.net.au +61(0)419496150 TomW Communications Pty Ltd. PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia Liability limited by a scheme approved under Prof. Standards Legislation Honorary Lecturer, Computer Science, Australian National University https://cecs.anu.edu.au/research/profile/tom-worthington _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
