What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [64]
In this confrontation, we witness the millennial clash of old and new media models: the content economy vs. the link economy. The AP, like the papers it serves, thought its content was its value and its magnet. But online, content without links is the tree that falls in the forest that nobody hears (and turns into newsprint). So the real value in this transaction was not the content that was, in the AP’s view, stolen, but the links that were, in the bloggers’ view, given. The content economy made money by controlling and selling content. In the link economy, it no longer pays to sell copies of content when the original is just a link and a click away.
This link economy makes five demands: First, you must produce unique content with clear value; commodity content will get you no links or Googlejuice. Second, you must open up so Google and the world can find your content. (If you’re not searchable, you won’t be found.) Third, when you get links and audience, it is up to you to exploit them, usually through advertising. Fourth, you should use links to find new efficiencies. (Do what you do best and link to the rest.) Fifth, find opportunities to create value atop this link layer: curation of the best content; technology infrastructure to enable links to be found; and advertising networks to help creators monetize links and traffic. Exploiting this sort of tectonic shift—seeing how the world is disrupted and finding opportunity in it—is a key skill of Googlethink.
For news organizations, going digital is not as simple as filling web pages. This transformation requires them to reinvent themselves—how they think of themselves, how they operate, how they relate to the public, how they make money—and fast. Jeffrey Cole of the University of Southern California Annenberg School’s Center for the Digital Future found in a 2007 survey that young people 12 to 25 will “never read a newspaper.” Never. Philip Meyer wrote in his 2004 book The Vanishing Newspaper that if current trends continue, the last American paper will be published in 2040—and that downward slope has only steepened its decline since he said that. This is not a drill.
Google’s impact is more direct and immediate on media than on other industries—though their turns are coming. So as a demonstration of the discipline of adapting Google’s rules, I begin this chapter—unlike others to follow—by laying out relevant rules and explicitly interpreting them for newspapers.
Atoms are a drag. Newspapers assumed their competitive advantage was in owning the means of mass production and distribution. In the old, scarcity-based content economy, they were right. But now print’s infrastructure carries an unbearable cost burden. So I say papers should set a date in the not-too-distant future when they will turn off the presses.
Foolish, you say? Old mass media still has value, you argue. Online revenue is not meeting print revenue. As readers move to the internet, newsstand money disappears. In advertising, print dollars are replaced by mere online dimes. Don’t they still need paper? Yes, but the scale of newspapers’ businesses will never be the same now that they no longer hold local monopolies. In the shift from physical to digital and mass to niche, the best way to exploit the legacy value of a paper is to use its old-media megaphone to promote and build what comes next. First, a paper has to decide what is next. It has to design and build its post-paper products—retraining and restructuring staff and sloughing off unnecessary costs—before the presses go silent. It has to promote the new products even at the expense of the old: Cannibalize thyself. Convincing audience and advertisers to move to the future is better than following them there after they have discovered other sources of news.
Casting off atoms will allow newspapers to brag: