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The Age
Thursday June 11, 2009
AS THE editors and publishers of America's mainstream print media reach for their pitchforks before a showdown with Google, the smiling face of their designated nemesis argues they're part of the solution, not the problem.Marissa Mayer, Google's vice-president of search product and user experience, explains what she calls the "atomic unit of consumption" and what happens to it at times of disruption caused by emerging media.Consider how Apple's iTunes online music service extinguished the album, replacing it with the single track download. Or how Google-owned YouTube condensed the hour-long TV show into the three-minute clip.The same, she says, is happening to print: the internet has atomised that bundle of news, information and crosswords known as a newspaper into its constituent parts."It's clear the internet has challenged a lot of notions on how people want to consume news and that's in the nature of the media - I don't think that's specific to Google," she says.Mayer was talking just after a group of top US newspaper executives met in Chicago to discuss the future of news gathering.The meeting took place against a backdrop of collapsing circulation and shrinking ad revenues. Already this year several big city papers have closed, others have gone online only and hundreds of employees have lost their jobs.At the meeting, the American Press Institute detailed a plan to better protect the newspapers' online content from unfair use by aggregators and bottom-feeders and to reclaim a bigger cut of the revenues from that content. The plan involves putting newspapers' online content behind a paywall.The institute's report blames Google for having caused that atomisation of content and Mayer is identified as a "frenemy" (part friend, part enemy).Google, says Mayer, is good for newspapers and she offers statistical proof of friendship: traffic referral of more than a billion clicks a month to newspaper websites and a payout to publishers in 2008 of more than $US5 billion ($A6.3 billion) for hosting Google advertising. She dispenses some advice, implying that newspapers are partly to blame for their predicament. "The approach, 'let's just take whatever appeared in the print paper and put it on a web page', doesn't work," she says. She points out how sites such as online retailer Amazon.com and YouTube construct their contents so there's always more to buy or more to watch. "I can go to various newspapers and, once you scroll down to the bottom, what do you do next? There are related stories and videos but those are up the top. So now the most committed user - the one that reads through the entire piece - is at the bottom of the page with nothing to do."Mayer says linking to more information, engaging readers in dialogue and making the content more interactive are part of the "web fundamentals" that could be used to "end up with a product that will look different than news online does today".
© 2009 The Age