@Society of Editors: Google News and 85 years of video on your iPod
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 7 November 2006 at 11:12
Tags: 18 Doughty Street, Google, Guardian, Journalism
Asked to examine what the media will look like in 2020, Google News’ product manager Nathan Stoll says a major factor in the democratisation of media is the plummeting cost of online storage.
Storage capacity doubles every 13 months, he says, so by 2020 an iPod like device would have enough capacity to hold 85 years of video, more than has ever been created until now.
Stoll stresses that Google is a technology company rather than a content producer. A symbiotic relationship with newspapers and other producers of editorial content is essential for its business to work.
“Without a healthy base of publishers, there won’t be a base of high quality content for search engine users,” he said.
One way to ensure the existance of this sort of a vibrant media ecosysten, Stoll says, is to reward and encourage high-quality content. In response to suggestions from newspaper editors, Stoll says, Google is working to improve Google News’ results to reward the originators of original journalism
But in the Q&A session, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said: “Nobody can decide wether Google is friend or enemy. It’s best to keep an open mind about it.”
Outgoing Society of Editors president Charles McGhee says the assembled journalists have let Stoll off the hook about potentially demanding revenue-sharing, as suggested by Andrew Neil on Sunday night.
Stoll responds that Google works with content producers in three ways:
- Giving them choice about whether to participate, using robots.txt to opt out or opting in when they have a subscription wall;
- Fair dealing: only using headlines to drive traffic to content producers while licencing content that need to be used as a whole, such as the maps on Google Maps; and
- Helping publishers build sustainable businesses around the traffic driven to the m by Google users.
McGhee is unimpressed, and points out that the Belgian papers attempted to opt out and demand licencing with their lawsuit against Google. Stoll replies that there are many misunderstandings about the Belgian case and that Google is still talking to the Belgian papers.
Moderator Alistair Stewart points out that newspapers have very little leverage with Google. Alan Rusbridger agrees, saying that “Google will only shake in their boots if all the world’s publishers got together on this”.
As the converation continues, the editors express their concern about how journalism will be paid for when it is disaggregated by tools like Google. Rusbridger looks at Stoll down the table and draws laughs when he quips: “Believe me, you don’t want Polly Toynbee’s wage bill!”
