Marissa Mayer, Larry Page on journalism’s future
Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search product and experience, testified before Congress earlier this week on the future of journalism. She noted that the Web requires a “fundamentally different” style of presentation of news and suggested that publishers treat articles as “atomic units of consumption,” in other words, news stories that can stand alone.
She also suggested that evolving stories be associated with specific URLs, or domain names, and updated as they happen. When a reader finishes a story, they should be given a next step, such as clicking on a related story or advertisement.
Mayer’s prepared remarks reminded me a lot of conversation I had with Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, at the company’s Christmas party in December. We talked at length about the need for more journalists and smarter and more diverse coverage of everything from science to local government. Page described how he would like to see news articles more closely resemble Wikipedia articles – with the news on top continuously updated – so that if he was following a story about Hurricane Katrina he would be able to immediately pick up where he left off.
Wikinews, the “free news source you can write,” is already trying something similar. However, a comparison of the traffic on Wikinews, Google News and the New York Times, suggests the Wikinews approach isn’t quite what users are looking for.
Daylife.com, an entirely different kind of journalistic experiment, fares slightly better than Wikinews by using data and heavy-duty computation and analysis to create pages, sections and destinations that, it claims, attract more traffic and generate higher advertising revenues.
While neither or these experiments, nor the dozens of others,are roaring successes, their willingness to innovate has made them the precursors to the news organizations of the future.
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Hi Elise,
Should be noted that Daylife’s primary line of business to to serve publishers with our platform, the underlying technology and tools that are behind our showcase site, Daylife.com - and are in use by some brands in several countries like the USA Today, Sky, Wall Street Journal, Turner Sports, the Times of India, Khaleej Times. As such, our platform serves up quite a lot of pages!
Upendra,
It sounds like you are saying that the Compete figures I cited don’t do justice to the adoption of your platform.
Elise
Elise,
Marissa Mayer suggested that if newspapers would associate same-topic stories with specific URLs, these URLs would get more page rank, and would be better placed in search engine results. This remains true even if users wouldn’t care for it, because a single page with many articles would be more linked than each article on its own page.
And maybe Wikinews and Daylife are indeed benefiting from these strategies. Suppose they have 20% more users than they would have without it. Still they are not close to New York Times because, well… they are not New York Times. That doesn’t mean that NYT could not benefit from these strategies, does it? And if NYT gets 20% of its 14 million unique users, that is a lot of people.
I believe there are technical ways of accomplishing what Marissa Mayer recommended without human intervention. I will invite you to have a look at the “Fake” New York Times demo:
http://www.icents.net/demo/news/news.html
This demo is a proof of concept for some media expert ideas, including those of Marissa Mayer.
What do you think of it?
Best,
Marc.