Google – Page 10 – Media Nation

More powerful than Googlezon!*

One of my favorite bomb-tossers, John Ellis, has uncorked a doozy. In a column for the Web site RealClearMarkets, Ellis proposes that Google make an offer to the New York Times Co. that it can’t refuse. Ellis’ arguments:

Mega-wealthy Google could easily afford to buy the Times Co., the price of which will only keep dropping.
Even though the Times Co.’s controlling stock is owned by members of the Sulzberger family, who don’t want to sell, there’s a point beyond which the family can no longer screw other shareholders.
Rupert Murdoch seems determined to transform the Wall Street Journal into a serious competitor to the Times on all kinds of news, not just financial — and he can afford to run the Journal at a loss.
Google, like Murdoch, doesn’t need to turn a profit with a small investment like the Times — but may make money anyway if it can leverage Times content across multiple platforms.
Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. isn’t getting it done, and has been in charge for so long now that it seems clear that’s not going to change.

Ellis, a former Boston Globe columnist, offers some provocation for us locals as well, suggesting that Google could get the price down to a mere $3 billion or so by selling off the Times Co.’s other properties, including the Globe, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and its share of the Red Sox and of New England Sports Network. (If the right buyer for the Globe can be found? Go ahead, make my day. But that’s a big if.)

Ellis’ piece is a suggestion, not a prediction. Still, it’s worth noting that in October 2006, when it looked as though a group headed by retired General Electric chairman Jack Welch might buy the Globe, Ellis wrote: “Mr. Sulzberger would be a fool, of course, to sell the Globe to anyone at this juncture.”

He was exactly right. Which raises the question of whether Times Co. executives now would be fools not to sell the Globe.

Ellis’ proposal is logical, if unlikely to happen. But given that all of our great news organizations are going to have to find new, once-unthinkable ways of surviving, I can imagine a worse fate for the Times than landing in the arms of Google, which generally, though not always, lives up to its “don’t be evil” philosophy. Better Google than Murdoch, certainly. (Via Romenesko.)

*Click here for reference.

Heavy grading, light blogging

I’m up to my neck in end-of-semester grading, and I’m coming down with a cold. So don’t look for much fresh content this week.

I do want to call your attention to a conference held at Southern New Hampshire University last week on blogging the New Hampshire primary. We ended up talking about everything but that, but that’s OK. The New England News Forum, which sponsored the discussion, has an account here. Christine Stuart of CT News Junkie writes it up here.

Also, Robert Weisman of the Boston Globe reports that Google’s Street View will arrive in Boston today at 10 a.m. I’m figuring there’s a pretty good chance I’ll be captured coming out of the Northeastern Au Bon Pain with a medium regular.

Gmail changes quietly

I noticed some changes to the Gmail interface yesterday as I was catching up on my mail. (That’s not quite an accurate statement. I’m never caught up on my mail.) It seems slightly more attractive, and “Contacts” has been beefed up considerably. But it also seems to be slightly slower.

I switched to Gmail last spring, and, for the most part, I’m glad I did. My mail is now available on any machine on which I happen to find myself, and searching is lightning-fast — a real boon, given that I can’t remember where I’ve filed anything. (Although Gmail’s labels are much more flexible than folders.)

My one complaint: Gmail lets me set up several different identities, so that I can send outgoing mail so that it looks like I’m using either my Northeastern account or my personal account. But my official Gmail address, which I do not use, gets stamped on my mail anyway. That’s led a few of my contacts to start using my Gmail address. I guess I’d put that in the “mildly annoying” category.

Nothing specific at the Gmail Blog about what’s going on, although I suppose this is related somehow. Thoughts?

Bug alert! Unless I’m doing something wrong — always a possibility — it looks like you can’t save changes in someone’s contact information.

Google ads and “the long tail”

Does Lou Ureneck really think the little guys whose ads have popped up on his Web site about fishing in Greece would otherwise be taking out ads in newspapers? The Boston University journalism department chair writes about this in an op-ed piece for the Boston Globe:

[T]hose little Google ads that are popping on my website are chipping — more like hacking — away at newspapers by cutting into their revenue streams. A newspaper spends an enormous amount of money on its newsroom and production plants to bring me my morning paper. It needs that revenue to operate.

Google, on the other hand, spends not a dime on the collection of news. Its business, in part, is based on aggregating the work of others — or getting a cut from the advertising that appears on the websites of others. It’s a brilliant business model. No wonder it has a market capitalization of $160 billion.

In a sense, I am contributing to problems of newspapers by jumping into Web publishing and accepting advertising. Is this fair? Well, fair or not, it clearly is inevitable.

In fact, Ureneck’s site, and the advertising that appears on it, are examples of “the long tail,” an economics concept popularized in an article and book by Wired editor Chris Anderson. The long tail refers to tiny transactions that are too inefficient for anyone to bother with in a mass-market environment, but that become worthwhile as the cost of making those transactions goes down. The idea is that the Internet has reduced that cost nearly to zero.

An example of this is the limited number of books and CDs even a large retailer like Borders or Barnes & Noble can carry, versus the much larger selection offered by a virtual retailer like Amazon.com. But even Amazon is a mass marketer compared to hundreds and thousands of smaller sites. As the long tail lengthens, the size of the mass market might shrink (which is Ureneck’s concern.) But it’s not going to go away by any means.

As for Google and the news business, well, that’s been the subject of uneasy conversations for some time now. Late this past spring, Washington Post journalist-turned-UC Berkeley professor Neil Henry got his cookies toasted for seeming not to understand that Google News actually drives users to news organizations’ Web sites (and their advertising) — thus making, not costing, them money.

Ureneck asserts that Google “spends not a dime on the collection of news.” True, but as of last week, the company now intends to spend many dimes so that others can collect news: It’s subscribing to the Associated Press and other news services, and is featuring their full content on its Google News site. (Yahoo! News has been doing that since the beginning.)

If you think Google has been getting something of a free ride, then maybe you’ll see that as good news. But Poynter’s Amy Gahran cites a Forbes article that notes this “could diminish Internet traffic to newspaper and broadcast companies’ Web sites where those stories and photos are also found — a development that could reduce those companies’ revenue from online advertising.”

It’s all very complicated.

Google Documents and Blogger

For some time now, I’ve been looking for a way to post to Media Nation without having to do it from directly within Blogger. Well, I just read in MacWorld that Google Documents has a publish-to-blog feature, so I’m giving that a try.

What are the advantages? First, it’s got a roomier, easier-to-work-with window than Blogger. second, it has more features, like strikethrough. It’s not ideal; unlike Ecto, I have to be connected to the Internet to use Google Documents. But I could never seem to get the settings right for Ecto.