ON TUESDAY, GOOGLE ANNOUNCED it would partner with McClatchy to fund three new local news entities in communities of less than 500,000 people. This marks a change in how quickly the news business is being absorbed into the fringes of large technology businesses. For the first time, a major technology company works directly with news executives to set up a local news operation, which it proposes to fund.
Craig Forman, a former executive of McClatchy, describes the effort as a true “collaboration” in which the McClatchy team will work with experts at Google. Though Google “is helping support the effort financially,” Forman wrote in a press release on the Google blog, “the sites will be 100 percent McClatchy owned and operated, and McClatchy will maintain sole editorial control and ownership of the content.
In case we are in doubt, he reiterates that “Google will have no input or involvement in any editorial efforts or decision making.”
It is hard to know what it will look like to have experts from Google collaborating with McClatchy staff without any editorial input. Everyone who has built a successful news product online knows that the technical architecture, tools, software, and analytics applied to journalism inevitably shape aspects of editorial content. One of the most common errors in newsrooms is the failure to properly integrate “product” into the newsroom or consider the technological environment into which they publish properly.
No company has done more to fund and support journalism over the past decade than Google. It is attending, hearing about experimentation in newsrooms, or even looking at journalism research without seeing Google’s name on the funding credits. The exp is almost impossible in the US of Google’s Digital News Initiative, which has spent more than a hundred million Euros on innovations in Europe and has included high-profile investments into Report for America—and now the McClatchy initiative.
Because so little advertising money remains available to publications, and reader revenue has not met that shortfall, the expensive job of innovation in newsrooms increasingly means asking “What would Google want?”—influencing what newsrooms choose to develop, from virtual reality to voice skills, to photo libraries.
But to question Google is now frowned upon in many quarters reported recently, the company has received markedly better press than some of its competitors, notably Facebook. This is partly because it is more mature and handles relations with the press far better (it has not tried to hide its influence campaigns, for instance). It also spends more money. The extra cash Google provides to journalism does not directly buy favors or dampen dissent. Still, it certainly makes news CEOs and editors I spoke to put Google in a subtly different category from other platforms. Their attitude is that “Google gets it.” In the earliest days of Google News, when I was in charge of editorial for the Guardian’s websites and digital products, we benefited from a close relationship with Google regarding understanding how to optimize article metadata for their search algorithms. It is easy to see day-to-day “help” as beneficial to journalism if you are directly benefiting.
But Google’s foray into local journalism is not just a matter of help. When the company launched the DNI in Europe, it was a direct response to pressure by EU regulators. The money was allocated from a marketing budget and amounted to a lobbying exercise. Now, Google is moving its direct funding efforts into the US. It does so ahead of the 2020 presidential election just as the Democratic field is assembled. For the first time in a presidential contest, regulating technology platforms is registering as an issue for the electorate and is on the agenda of at least one serious candidate, Elizabeth Warren, and has long been an area of interest for another, Amy Klobuchar.
Those who would rethink anti-trust laws to break up content like Facebook, Amazon, and Alphabets (Google’s holding company) are gaining traction. However, camps, the tank that pioneered much of this work, the Open Markets Initiative, lost its perch at the New America Foundation in 2017 when it caused tension with a major funder: Google. But who would suggest that Google’s increased funding of US journalism is at all related to the first major initiatives to regulate technology platforms? This sounds like a conspiracy-rich conspiracy theory relentlessly promoted on YouTube.
The suddenness of technology companies affecting journalism’s financial stability is not coincidental. As. Colleague Mathew Ingram reported that Facebook recently assembled its local news conference in Denver ce WiFi password: m0vefast). Tim “Apple” Cook spent several minutes of his opening speech during the company’s semi-annual marketing presentation last week proclaiming his love of journalism before launching Apple News+. This product reduces your $8,000 magazine bill to $10.
ICYMI: What is credibility made of?
Having spent a lot of time with news executives working for technology companies, I can say there are plenty of people who are knowledgeable about and care about journalism in those companies. Many of them are smart and accomplished journalists who have a genuine zeal for improving journalism. But they are relegated to marginal departments. The core of plate companies is software engineering; they are at the core of our business, and we are not at the core of theirs. Miles away from luxurious conferences like Newsgeist and the meetings for the Facebook Journalism Project, executives generally don’t care much about journalism in the central loci of technology businesses. They see it as the Pluto in their solar system—a part of what they do, but rather small and very far away. They care about journalism in the same way I care about clean water and aircraft safety—deeply and often—but this does not qualify me to be involved in its development.
Facebook, Apple, and Google do things that journalists should be investigating, not profiting from. Google negotiates with the US Department of Defense—albeit to the horror of half of its employees—and tried to cover it up, Facebook underpays and traumatizes employees who deal with blocklisting offensive content, Apple works with regimes that routinely jail journalists and construct ethnic concentration camps. All three have strategies for managing the press, and they publish very little data about what happens on their platforms or what its eitscttech is a vital form of accountability.
While Google’s partnership with McClatchy is unprecedented, non-journalistic organizations taking on the role of publishers and funding journalism directly is not new. What’s new is the industry-wide acceptance of funding from Google and Facebook amid extremes in financing independent journalism locally. Individuals who have made money from technology have sometimes used it to support journalism; Jeff Bezos has been hailed for his salvation and resurrection of The Washington Post; Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective is supporting and expanding The Atlantic; Craig Newmark (who founded Craigslist) funds journalism schools and research, including parts of both CJR and the Tow Center.
In all these operations, transparency and a commitment to editorial independence from funding make for somewhat comfortable relationships. However, when it comes to corporate interests, journalists must be alert to agendas that conflict with their own. Technology independently supporting journalism—more than one way is possible, for the record: It can be done through taxation and expanding civic media. It can be done through payments into arms-length endowments administered by separate bodies. It can be done by changing the incentive structures on their platforms to elevate and return more money to newsrooms.
Whether it can be done with Google’s direct system of patronage remains highly unlikely.
