Mercedes Bunz

Yesterday, I finally managed to read the cover story of the new Atlantic “How to save the news”, a very readable essay by James Fallows. I decided to sum up the most important points for me to remember, and for you to have a quick overview:

1 The news business is passing through an agonizing transition — bad enough, but different from dying.

2 Don’t worry. Google views the survival of “premium content” as important to its own welfare. We are save!?!? (Therefore its experiments with Living Stories, FastFlip or YouTube Direct.)

3 Google News made Googlers wonder: Once something has been observed, nearly every media outlet says approximately the same thing. Google says: The news industry will not be able to sustain producing highly similar articles.

4 Google’s advice: Making news more sustainable with presentation of news more interesting, varied, and involving. Focus on the user, not focus on getting money out of the user.

5 Eric Schmidt’s believe: The audience is there, and the dollars will follow. Online display will be more attractive. Much more online-ad money can be flowing to news organizations. And subscribers can and will pay for news.

Allright then.

PS: What struck me while reading the article: Like James Fallow, who has been a onetime program designer at Microsoft, a lot of people at Google have worked in old media before. Will there be only one media business in the future, and it focusses on delivering knowledge?
PS2: “Bad enough, but different from dying” could be claim of the new century next to Facebook’s “It’s complicated”