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By Root 766 0

“Google has brought massive shifts in the way different generations and people think,” said ad industry visionary Rishad Tobaccowala. He predicted that as a result, “there’s going to be a huge new business which is built around the psychology of being analog in a digital world—everything that has to do with therapy. Which I think is why spas are so big now.” That may be why Google’s offices feature pods where employees can shut off the world and easy chairs where they can just stare at an aquarium. It’s stressful organizing and changing the world. But before you check yourself into the sanitarium, remember that the real moral to the Google story is this: If Google can do it, so can you. Google is seeing problems, solving them, and finding opportunities in them by thinking in new ways. This is all about finding your own new worldview.

There are two ways to attack the problems of these industries: to reform the incumbents or to destroy them. In some cases, we’ll take one path, in others both. But in any case, the wise course is to destroy your own models before some kid in a garage—or in a Harvard or Stanford dorm room—figures out a way to do it for you. Think like Google, succeed like Google—before Google does.

Media

The Google Times

Googlewood

GoogleCollins

The Google Times: Newspapers, post-paper

On what turned out to be an eventful week in London in 2008, Edward Roussel, digital editor for the Telegraph Media Group, told me over tea and toast that he had pondered the question I ask in this book’s title. He answered it with a striking vision for newspapers: What if papers handed over much of their work to Google? Roussel reasoned that Google already is their best distributor online. He couldn’t imagine a paper creating better technology or attracting better technical talent than Google. In advertising, Google is the clear winner. So why not outsource distribution, technology, and a good share of ad sales to Google as a platform so the paper could concentrate on its real job—journalism?

Roussel was following a key rule in this book: Decide what business you’re in. The next day, I issued the same challenge to his competition, the Guardian, where I work and where I wound up a series of seminars on the future of journalism. My assignment was to pose 10 questions papers should answer now. The first: Who are we? Papers must no longer think of themselves as manufacturers or distributors. Are they in the information business? That would seem obvious, but when information can be so quickly and easily commodified, it is a perilous position. Are they in the community business, like Facebook? Not quite; few papers enable communities to organize themselves. Are they in the knowledge business, like Google or Amazon? Not yet; they haven’t put themselves in the position to know what their readers know. In the end, I urged papers to become platforms for larger networks of news—but they’re not there yet.

The night before, the Guardian had invited Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post, to speak. She announced she was taking her service local and would invade Chicago, hiring one editor to build a site around the best bloggers there. A reporter at the beleaguered Chicago Tribune—which now had Huffington’s target on its back—asked me how the paper should respond. My reply: The old way would have been to treat Huffington as a competitor. The new way would be to find the means to work with her: Sell local ads for her and get a piece of her revenue. Quote her bloggers in the paper, taking advantage of her recruiting and relationships and earning friendship—and links—in return. Start new blogs that Huffington’s writers would want to talk about and link to. Give Huffington headlines from the Tribune, which also link to the paper. The Tribune no longer owns the market, I told him. Its ambition should be to join and help a network.

News organizations don’t yet think that way. That same week, while in London, I became embroiled online in a bloggers’ battle with the Associated Press, which had sent legal letters to a