Bing – Media Nation

Trump punishes the AP for sticking with the Gulf of Mexico name

The power to rename things and to demand that others recognize that power is something that is right out of the authoritarian’s playbook. So if you think Donald Trump’s insistence that we refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America isn’t a big deal, think again. By getting us to go along, he makes us complicit.

Earlier today I wrote that Google Maps is now using the Gulf of America name despite 400 years of custom and a complete lack of international support. Now comes more ominous news: The Associated Press, which issued style guidance that keeps it as the Gulf of Mexico, says the Trump administration denied AP journalists access to a White House event. Here is what AP executive editor Julie Pace said:

Today we were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office. This afternoon AP’s reporter was blocked from attending an executive order signing.

It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism. Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment.

The AP Stylebook is the industry standard, used not just by the agency’s own journalists but by many other news organizations besides. I hope the AP stands firm.

And shame on Google. Throughout the day, I saw anti-Trump folks on social media announce they would switch to Apple Maps or Microsoft’s Bing Maps. It’s futile. They’re standing fast for now, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or both of them give in a few days from now.

The Globe reports on Maine’s troubled papers; plus, the Gulf of What?, and some recovery in DC and LA

Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan has written an interesting examination of what’s gone wrong at the Portland Press Herald and other papers that are part of the Maine Trust for Local News.

On the one hand, the story feels provisional — we still don’t know why two top executives left suddenly, and severe cuts that observers had told me were coming are, well, still coming. The executives who left recently were Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, co-founder and CEO of the National Trust for Local News, which acquired the papers in 2023, and Lisa DeSisto, CEO of the Maine Trust — and, before that, publisher of the Press Herald. Other top people have departed as well.

On the other hand, Ryan has some details I hadn’t seen before. For one thing, the Trust reported that it lost $500,000 in 2024 as the decline of advertising outpaced gains in digital subscription revenue.

More shocking is that former owner Reade Brower apparently considered David Smith as a potential buyer before selling to the National Trust. Smith, the head of the right-wing television network Sinclair Broadcasting, is currently turning The Baltimore Sun into an embarrassment. Sinclair owns WGME-TV (Channel 13) in Portland, so who knows what sort of synergistic hell Smith had in mind.

Brower instead sold the papers to the National Trust for $15 million (a figure that’s being reported for the first time from documents that Ryan obtained) in the hope that a nonprofit organization would prove to be a better steward.

One data point I do want to address is Dr. Hansen Shapiro’s compensation, reported in the National Trust’s public 1099 filings and noted by both the Press Herald at the time that she stepped down and now by the Globe.

Hansen Shapiro did make a lot of money — nearly $371,000 in 2023 compared to just $117,000 in 2021. At the same time, though, 2021 was when the Trust pulled off its first deal, buying 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver suburbs. The Trust today owns 65 papers in Colorado, Georgia and Maine. Given the Trust’s pivot to a hands-on operating role, Hansen Shapiro’s job responsibilities changed as well.

I’m not writing this to defend her compensation or, for that matter, the Trust’s change of focus. But it’s important context to think about.

“Journalists employed by the Maine Trust said while they remain hopeful about the new ownership, they question aspects of its approach,” Ryan writes, who notes that no one among the rank and file would speak with him on the record “because they feared retaliation.”

Finally, my usual disclosures: Ellen Clegg and I interviewed Hansen Shapiro for our book, “What Works in Community News,” and featured her on our podcast; we are both professional friends with DeSisto; and we gave a book talk at a fundraiser for the Maine Trust last fall.

Google caves

I learned this last night from journalist Dan Gillmor’s Bluesky feed: Google has apparently become the first of the internet map publishers to give in to Donald Trump’s ridiculous demand that the Gulf of Mexico now be referred to as the Gulf of America.

“I typed Gulf of Mexico into Google Maps,” Gillmor wrote. “It edited my query without permission and showed me the Trump cult invention that isn’t and never will be the real thing.”

At least as of this writing, Apple Maps and Microsoft’s Bing Maps are sticking with the Gulf of Mexico. But who knows what we’ll find tomorrow?

After Trump announced that he was renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Denali mountain in Alaska (it is reverting back to Mount McKinley), The Associated Press issued guidance for its bureaus and any other news outlets who use its stylebook.

The AP will continue to refer to the Gulf of Mexico, which is an international body of water whose name has 400 years of tradition behind it; but it will go along with Mount McKinley because it is entirely on U.S. territory. It was only in 2015 that President Barack Obama issued an order restoring the mountain’s original Indigenous name.

By the way, the U.S. Geological Survey is going with Gulf of America too — but that’s hardly surprising given that it’s a federal agency.

No thanks to their owners

Good work is the best answer to the damage that two billionaire owners have done to their storied newspapers.

Semafor reports that The Washington Post has seen an upsurge in web traffic since Trump’s chaotic return to office, notwithstanding owner Jeff Bezos’ untimely killing of a Kamala Harris endorsement just before the election. One especially hot story: a report on the White House’s illegal federal spending freeze.

Meanwhile, Sarah Scire reports for Nieman Lab that the Los Angeles Times experienced a rise in paid subscriptions during the recent wildfires even though the paper had temporarily dropped its paywall. Like Bezos, LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong canceled a Harris endorsement, provoking outrage, resignations and cancellations.

Microsoft’s president says Google and Facebook should pay for news content

The Overton Window has opened a bit wider for the idea of requiring Google and Facebook to pay for news content. At Axios, Sara Fischer reports that Microsoft president Brad Smith has endorsed the Australian government’s move to do just that — and thinks such a system ought to be considered in the U.S. as well.

What’s taking place in Australia is complicated, but essentially it requires Google and Facebook to bargain with the news business and come up with a compensation system. Both companies have said they would stop offering some of their services if Australian authorities don’t back off.

In the U.S., the News Media Alliance, a lobbying group for news publishers, has been pushing for several years for an antitrust exemption that would allow them the right to bargain collectively with the tech giants — which is exactly what is going to happen in Australia. With the sheen wearing off Big Tech’s once-sterling image, the likelihood of Congress passing such an exemption has increased. A lawsuit brought by a group of West Virginia newspapers that I wrote about for GBH News last week may serve as a further goad.

In a blog post, Microsoft’s Smith cites a News Media Alliance study showing that Google makes an estimated $4.7 billion a year “from crawling and scraping news publishers’ content.” That study came under fire at the time of its release a couple of years ago. But regardless of the actual figure, Google — and Facebook — are surely making a lot of money from other people’s content without paying for any of it.

Smith makes no bones about his own business imperatives, saying that Microsoft is prepared to play by Australia’s rules through its Bing search engine, writing:

Microsoft’s Bing search service has less than 5% market share in Australia, substantially smaller than the 15-20% market share that we have across PC and mobile searches in the United States and the 10-15% share we have in Canada and the United Kingdom. But, with a realistic prospect of gaining usage share, we are confident we can build the service Australians want and need. And, unlike Google, if we can grow, we are prepared to sign up for the new law’s obligations, including sharing revenue as proposed with news organizations. The key would be to create a more competitive market, something the government can facilitate. But, as we made clear, we are comfortable running a high-quality search service at lower economic margins than Google and with more economic returns for the press.

A final thought. If Congress isn’t prepared to act, might it be possible to require Google and Facebook to compensate news publishers at the state level? Jack Nicas reports in today’s New York Times that a proposal has been made in North Dakota to forbid Apple and Google from collecting app-store fees from North Dakota-based businesses.

The legislation strikes me as more than a little half-baked. Yet the principle — that states can impose their own regulations on Big Tech — is one worth pondering.

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What a Bing News deal might mean for journalism

cash_register_20091130 I can’t remember the last time the media world was as excited about a business deal that may or may not be consummated as the one involving Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch. The reason, I think, is three-fold.

First, it potentially moves us beyond the tired old debate about pay walls (I say “potentially,” because we don’t know if Murdoch will give up on that misbegotten notion).

Second, it could provide an answer to the question of who should pay whom, and how.

Third, it could represent a monetary boost for paid journalism at a moment when the profession is in the midst of an existential crisis.

In simple terms, here’s how the deal might work. Microsoft is said to be offering to pay Murdoch and other newspaper publishers (and you’d need a lot of them; Rupe can’t do this alone) to make their sites invisible to Google, a simple matter that involves inserting a line of code. Thus if you wanted to search for a news story about, say, President Obama’s upcoming speech on Afghanistan, you would have use Microsoft’s Bing instead of Google.

Bing News would compete with Google’s automatically assembled Google News service. But, unlike Google, Microsoft would share advertising revenues from Bing News with the news organizations to which it is linking.

To be sure, Google News is the most benign of aggregators. It places no advertising on its home page. That’s important because it’s a customizable substitute front page. Most people read a news site by scanning headlines and ledes, and only occasionally clicking on a story. Thus, if Google were to try to make money from the Google News home page, it could rightly be accused of stealing the most valuable parts of newspaper stories and profiting from that theft. (And, as we know, there are aggregators that do precisely that. As I’ve argued before, Michael Wolff’s Newser may be the most blatant.)

If you search Google News, you will be shown ads related to what you’re looking for. But as Howard Owens has pointed out, if you are searching for a news story on a particular topic, then you are going to click through. Those are valuable readers whom Google is sending to news organizations. And, as Jeff Jarvis argues, it’s not Google’s fault if newspaper executives haven’t been able to figure out how to monetize the audience Google is sending to them.

With that bit of background out of the way, let’s turn this on its head. One of the things about Internet commerce that makes for such fascinating — and frustrating — debate is that it’s unclear which direction the money should be moving in. Even though Google has attempted to step lightly with its news service, Murdoch and some other news executives argue that Google should share ad revenues generated by Google News.

But imagine, if you will, an alternative universe in which newspaper sites were rolling in advertising revenues from readers Google sent their way, but in which Google itself couldn’t find a way to make any money. (Such a scenario requires you to believe a number of ridiculous things, but never mind.) Can you imagine what the debate would be? You’d hear demands that cash-fattened newspaper owners share some of their newly gotten wealth with Google. You’d hear threats that Google would exclude news sites that refused.

My point is that there isn’t really any underlying principle as to who ought to pay for what online. Rather, the debate is driven by who’s making money, who’s losing money and — here’s where we get back to Microsoft — the business model of any particular Internet company.

What is Microsoft’s business interest with respect to Bing? Simply this: to build market share, establishing Bing as a serious search alternative to Google. Bing has a long way to go, with 10 percent of the market to Google’s 65 percent. That said, Bing has received good reviews since its debut earlier this year. And it’s really the only search engine to emerge as any kind of rival to Google pretty much since Google slipped into view in the late 1990s.

Bing News, as a partner of news sites rather than a rival, would have some advantages over Google News. The biggest would be that it wouldn’t have to pussyfoot around with regard to advertising. Since it would be sharing revenue, it could assemble an ad-laden home page, and make its search results more advertising-driven than Google News’ are.

Since it would be sharing those revenues, the news organizations, rather than complain, would be cheering Microsoft on. And if users came to understand that they had to visit Bing in order to search, say, the world’s 100 or so biggest and best newspapers, then Bing would quickly gain market share at Google’s expense.

Sadly, this would represent a significant setback to Google’s vision of indexing all the world’s knowledge. But there has always been an inherent tension in leaving it to a private corporation to carry out such a utopian plan. Look at the ongoing battle over Google Books, which would benefit everyone, but none more than Google.

It would also represent business as usual for Microsoft, which dominated the 1980s and ’90s not by offering more to its customers but by crippling its competitors. This is a company that, as legend would have it, built market share for its spreadsheet, Excel, by rewriting MS-DOS — its Windows precursor — so that the leading program, Lotus 1-2-3, wouldn’t run properly. “The job’s not done till Lotus won’t run” is one variation of the supposed battle cry heard in Redmond. Paying newspapers to pull out of Google is just the latest iteration of that theme.

But will it work? Is there any way a Bing News service could generate the sort of advertising revenue that would make up for a significant chunk of what the traditional media have lost? Somehow it seems doubtful. Still, it strikes me as a far more worthy experiment than whatever Steven Brill has been cooking up with his paid-content scheme for lo these many months. I hope we’ll get a chance to see how this all plays out.

More on Murdoch and Microsoft

In my latest for the Guardian, I take a closer look at Rupert Murdoch’s dalliance with Microsoft, whose search engine, Bing, is emerging as the main competitor to Google.

The Murdoch-Microsoft story, which I first wrote about last week, got a huge boost yesterday in the Financial Times. Today the New York Times follows up.