Abstract
The newspaper industry and Google have much more in common than some journalists realise, says an executive at the tech giant
Full disclosure: I consider myself a news person. I spent almost a decade at BBC News and before that helped set up the television arm of the Associated Press news agency. Now I work at Google at the intersection of news and technology. It is not, as contributions to last quarter's British Journalism Review demonstrate, always a comfortable place to be (Give Us a Break; Give Me the Press Barons Any Day, BJR no 28:2, pp31). I read those and other recent criticisms with a degree of frustration.
Not that we should be immune from scrutiny. I believe wholeheartedly that when we get things wrong we should be held to account. But, like journalism, this is a debate that is best rooted in the facts. Let's start with the accusation that Google doesn't care about the news industry, or worse, that we – along with others in Silicon Valley – have somehow tried to kill off newspapers. That is simply not true.
At Google, we believe in access to information and freedom of expression, values we hold in common with the news industry. We believe in the power of news to record the truth, keep institutions in check and make for a better-informed, freer, more open society. The fact that one of Google's founders, Sergey Brin, grew up behind the Iron Curtain, where the destruction of a free press put democracy in a straitjacket, cemented early on our commitment to building services that promote news.
Google News was developed after the attacks on 9/11 to give people more access to news from diverse sources and viewpoints. An engineer called Krishna Bharat decided to build it after he discovered that a Google search for “World Trade Center” offered no results about what was happening on 9/11. Today, Google News connects readers with more than 80,000 news publishers around the world.
In 2016, our CEO, Sundar Pichai, spelt out Google's commitment to European publishers in a speech in Paris. “I grew up in a house in India where access to information meant the newspaper,” he said. “Google cares deeply about journalism – yes, because of the crucial role it plays in democratic society, ensuring the spread of knowledge and the free flow of information… Put simply, our futures are tied together.”
We recognise of course that today the news industry is facing an uncertain future. The Internet has changed everything. It has brought a cacophony of new voices and fragmented audiences in ways few anticipated. It has turned business models on their heads. The question is what can and should be done to meet those challenges. I am convinced it is better to work together than against each other.
A partner to the news industry
We have always seen ourselves as a partner to the news industry but, as in all relationships, we have had our ups and downs. Sometimes we would introduce (or cancel) products in the news space with little warning. We could have done more to work with newsrooms on product development and digital journalism skills to help solve some of the problems that were holding newspapers back online. And we were not organised in our conversations with publishers, so they didn't feel they could rely on us as a partner.
We learned our lesson, and today our approach is to engage early and often. In 2014, we announced the Digital News Initiative in Europe to address the news industry's legitimate concerns. The DNI is based around three pillars: the development of new products in partnership with news publishers, newsroom training and research, and an innovation fund of £130million.
Since we began the DNI we have, together with the industry, developed the open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages project, introduced new products like the YouTube Player for Publishers, helped train more than 35,000 European journalists in digital storytelling and disbursed more than £65million to support innovation in digital news.
The AMP project exemplifies the spirit of collaboration. It is an open-source publishing format that makes mobile web pages load faster and keeps the publisher in control. The project was a direct response to conversations with publishers about how hard it was to create a good mobile web experience for news. Research shows that 40 per cent of users will abandon a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load. The AMP project aims to solve that problem, and we're making good progress. On average, AMP pages load in less than a half a second. And they bring benefits in terms of revenue. Among publishers running programmatic ads on AMP pages, 85 per cent see greater click-through rates than on traditional pages. Today, thousands of domains – including hundreds of news organisations around the world – are using the AMP format.
In the spirit of ongoing dialogue, the DNI innovation fund recently hosted 250 journalists, news publishers and associations, as well as startups and new media innovators, at an event in Amsterdam. We heard from recipients about how Google's funding had allowed them to realise their vision for new products and new ideas.
And we announced almost £20million in new funding, the third tranche we have disbursed so far. Among more than 100 recipients were the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle's tool for automated transcription and translation of content; from Spain's Publico.es, the Transparent Journalism Tool, an open source application that will allow citizens to see inside the editorial process, and here in the UK a partnership between the Press Association and Urbs Media to support local journalists with automated, data-driven stories.
Organisations in the UK have received around £6.3million from the DNI so far. At City University, one of the latest recipients, a team of researchers is building an application for journalism called DMINR. The app combines machine learning and artificial intelligence – essentially putting powerful computers to work on a problem – on technologies to help reporters check facts, make sense of the huge amount of data the digital world has thrown up, and to verify information. City wants to boost investigative journalism by helping journalists find patterns or connections in very large data sets such as police, government and environmental data, and company records. These are not pie-in-the-sky ideas, never to come to fruition: the researchers will test the technologies in up to 30 European newsrooms, including with teams at The Guardian and The Telegraph in the UK, and the Investigations Unit at Ireland's national broadcaster RTE.
The DNI in Europe works hand in hand with Google's global News Lab, which helps journalists harness technology to surface stories, to provide more data and context, and to create more engaging storytelling. In 2016, we helped train more than 100,000 journalists globally, at no cost to them or their employers, including thousands of local and regional journalists here in the UK. And in June this year we announced that, through a partnership in Africa, we will train an additional 6,000 journalists across 12 major cities.
Our actions clearly show our commitment to the news industry. And while Facebook and others are also working hard on news, I don't think it helps in this debate to lump the technology companies together, as our business models and approach are quite different.
Tim Luckhurst wrote in the last edition of the BJR that, “the advertising revenue that [newspapers] hoped to acquire through the launch of online editions is being stolen ruthlessly by social media giants. These behemoths, which profit greatly by linking to the work or professional journalists are ruthlessly undermining the economics of professional journalism.” In Google's case that is simply not so…
Not competing for news publishers’ advertising
The majority of Google's revenue comes from showing advertisements when you search for a particular term, such as “car insurance” or “ski holidays”. This form of online advertising has allowed hundreds of thousands of UK businesses to reach customers around the world. Search advertising is not a market that news publishers have ever been in. Furthermore, there is no advertising on Google News. Zero. Indeed, you will rarely see advertising around news stories in Google Search either. Try it. Google a recent news story and see if there are adverts around the results. That's not how our business works.
Publishers tend to focus their efforts on display advertising. In display advertising, Google is a supplier of ad inventory to newspaper websites. Many publishers choose to use Google's advertising technology, such as AdSense and AdExchange, to place ads on their websites to make money without the hassle of acquiring thousands of advertisers and managing the back-end administration themselves. We show adverts on their sites and share revenues with the publisher. In every deal, without exception, the publisher partner keeps the majority – typically more than two-thirds – of ad revenue. In short, we only make money if the publisher is making money, and we share billions of dollars with news publishers every year in this way.
Far from “swallowing journalism” as Luckhurst suggests, Google Search and Google News drive more than 10billion clicks a month to publishers’ websites free. Both services are intended to get people off our site and onto the publisher's – representing an opportunity for publishers to make money from that audience. And we continue to expand the places that people can easily access news with features such as the feed in the Google app, in the Google Play Newsstand, through virtual reality experiments with the Financial Times, The Guardian and others, and by redesigning the Google News desktop and mobile experiences for users.
Our aim is to provide a wider and deeper variety of news sources with multiple viewpoints, based on your interests in current events.
Publishers can choose whether or not they want their articles to appear in Google News and Search – the majority choose to be included because it creates real value.
Research we commissioned from Deloitte in April 2016 estimated the value of each click sent to news publishers to be between 3.5p and 7p (an estimate we know to be conservative), and that overall referral traffic to major publishers in France, Spain, Germany and the UK was worth more than £650million. Ruthless theft it isn't.
In the ongoing debate about the future of news, the issue of fake news has loomed large. Some commentators have sought, perhaps understandably, to put newspapers on one side and tech companies on the other. Here again I would argue there is more to unite than divide us. In common with high-quality journalism, Google's aim has always been to connect people with the most useful and relevant information available.
The web has certainly made it easier to distribute misleading information, but it has also made it easier for citizens to find and access reliable information, to seek out reputable sources and get more facts. Recent research we commissioned suggests consumers use web searches to check facts they read online, in social media or heard from friends and family. Search is used to correct misinformation, not spread it, and by design shows multiple viewpoints on a single page of results.
In line with our mission, the best role we can play in combating the problem of fake news is in supporting the development and identification of high-quality content online, restricting the flow of money to deliberately misleading content and ensuring our reporting and feedback tools are as effective as they can be. To that end, earlier this year, we implemented a range of measures aimed at seeing more high-quality content surface from the web. These include improvements in search ranking and easier ways to provide us with direct feedback if people find inappropriate content.
We have introduced a fact check tag to Google News and search, and the feed to provide useful context for readers; we have partnered with organisations to counter misinformation during recent and upcoming elections in Europe; and we have funded more than a dozen of projects working on the verification of news content through the DNI innovation fund.
During the UK election specifically we worked with Full Fact and First Draft News on a first-of-its-kind partnership of fact checkers, economists, and statisticians to identify false stories on social media and to provide journalists with the context needed to debunk them quickly.
The quality of information available on the web should be a concern for everyone and we are determined to play our part in addressing the issues it raises for our users, partners and the news ecosystem.
The digital revolution has changed how we communicate, how we express ourselves, how we learn about the world around us. It has certainly brought big challenges. But when I see projects like those on show in Amsterdam I am optimistic about the future of news. There are so many new tools and capabilities to take advantage of. There is so much impressive digital journalism already being done. Sustainable business models still need be developed, and we are committed to working with publishers to be part of the solution.
That is because we recognise that the news organisations and Google are part of the same information ecosystem. Our futures are tied together. I strongly believe we are on the same side.