Google Wants You to Spend More Time With Google
Google Wants You to Spend More Time With Google
Good morning!
I hope your week is off to a good start. We’ll get right to the newsletter today, but before I do I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the citizens of Belarus and their fight to end authoritarian rule in their country and receive the actual results of a fair election.
OK, that’s all. Let’s get to it.
Your Weekly Roundup
We start this week with a series of stories coming out of Bon Appétit. In the wake of editor in chief Adam Rapoport’s resignation in June amid accounts of racial inequality and insensitivity at the publication, the magazine has been under increased scrutiny. On Thursday, three of Bon Appétit’s biggest video stars said they will no longer appear in any of the publication's videos due to failed contract negotiations that centered on differences in pay and number of appearances for the three stars versus those of White on-screen talent. On Friday, the New York Times reported that Bon Appétit’s only two Black staff members left the magazine after giving notice the week before. All of this comes as Condé Nast revealed the findings of an internal investigation centered on Bon Appétit’s video team. According to the company, the report found that race played no part in compensation for video work.
Last Wednesday, the New York Times reported its Q2 earnings. The headline was that for the first time ever, the New York Times saw its digital revenue exceed its print revenue. The company added 669,000 new subscribers in Q2, it’s biggest quarterly gain ever, to bring its total digital-only subscription number to 5.7 million. However, overall ad revenue fell 44 percent year-over-year, though that figure was less than the projected 50 to 55 percent. Overall operating profit fell 6.2 percent year over year, showing that not even the all-powerful New York Times is completely immune to the toll COVID-19 is taking on most American companies and businesses.
On Monday, CNBC Pro ran a Q&A with outgoing New York Times CEO Mark Thompson where he said that he doesn’t expect there to be a print version of the paper in 20 years. I wasn’t able to read the full article because it's behind a paywall.
And, on Tuesday, Sara Fischer at Axios ran a scoop about the New York Times researching what a subscription-based approach to their recommendation content website Wirecutter might look like. Wirecutter has been a leader in the affiliate revenue space for years now and adding a subscription layer on that content is fascinating. My first thought was: I’d probably end up paying for it.
In related news, Lukas Alpert, a media reporter at the Wall Street Journal, tweeted out a teaser of the company’s subscription numbers from the last quarter. Per Alpert, the Wall Street Journal added 203,000 digital subscriptions, which was up 81% from the first quarter of the year—that figure is a record number of subscriptions for a quarter for the organization.
As I’ve been covering in this newsletter, the state of local news in America is precarious—dire even. However, there are a few bright spots emerging and this week brought a few of them:
A group of former staff members who worked for 22nd Century Media, a publisher of 14 community newspapers in the Chicago suburban area that ceased operations in April of this year, are launching a new nonprofit digital newsroom to take its place. The North Shore Record is aiming to create a free, community-embedded, public-service, outlet, asking readers for monthly donations to keep the operation afloat. For sports media fans, one of members of The North Shore Record is J.A. Adande, esteemed sports reporter and pundit and director of sports journalism at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism.
In Eden Prairie, Minnesota, a local group of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, city leaders, and residents are launching the Eden Prairie News Group to take the place of Eden Prairie News, which printed its last edition in April. Eden Prairie is a community of 65,000 residents.
And at the age of 70, Ken Doctor, the media columnist at NiemanLab and former media executive who I frequently cite in this newsletter, is starting his own local news company. Called Lookout Local, its flagship site will be Lookout Santa Cruz and, as Marc Tracy reports, will put Doctor in direct competition with the Alden Capital-owned Santa Cruz Sentinel. Poytner notes that Lookout’s publication will primarily focus on markets with populations of 250,000 to 750,000 that lack robust daily news outlets. Lookout Local will be funded by the Knight Foundation, the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge, the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and others.
Also on the local news beat, on August 4th, the Washington Free Beacon ran a fascinating story covering the New York Times’s decision to delete hundreds of paid advertorials that the Chinese Communist Party was paying to have run on the company’s website.
Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be a week of rounding up media news without the announcement of layoffs. Last Friday, the New York Times reported that G/O Media (the media company best-known for destroying Deadspin) laid off 15 staff members in its video department. However, the Gizmodo Media Group Union released a statement that these layoffs were done by management without consulting with the editorial leadership of any of the company’s publications.
On August 4th, Facebook’s Journalism Project published the results of its collaboration with The Atlantic where the two organizations teamed up to drive subscribers for the publication through Facebook’s Instant Articles. The Instant Articles craze of 2015-2016 has long since died down and after being burned by Facebook’s inflation of video views numbers in the great “Pivot to Video” movement of the mid 2010s most publishers have been skeptical of any of Facebook’s supposedly “publisher friendly” initiatives. So it was interesting to read the results of the collaboration and to see that The Atlantic was the publisher that worked closely with Facebook on this. From March through June, Facebook Instant articles have helped drive 8,000 paid subscriptions to The Atlantic.
I recommend reading this fascinating thread from New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose, in which he dives into the most engaged with posts on Facebook and how misleading and dangerous those lists can actually be.
Finally, building off last week’s newsletter about the Substack revolution and journalists taking their destinies into their own hands, the cooking and food publication Taste ran a feature on indie food newsletters, many of which are being run on Substack and subsidized through the platforms subscription tools. The piece also dives into how indie food newsletters are often where the most interesting and adventurous food writing is happening today.
What I’m Engaged With
At the end of July, you may have heard that there was a much-discussed House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on antitrust that brought the CEOs of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple in front of Congress—well, brought them via Zoom in front of Congress.
There was plenty of coverage of that historic hearing last month, but today I want to look at a piece that was published right before that hearing as a bit of “preview” coverage.
On July 28th, the day before the hearing, The Markup published a piece looking at how Google has increasingly prioritized its own products and content over competitors and outside organizations. The headline figure is that 41% of 15,000 searches directed browsers to Google’s own properties.
Per its About page, The Markup is “a nonprofit newsroom that investigates how powerful institutions are using technology to change our society.” One of the things that I love about The Markup is how all of their investigative pieces are accompanied by a “Show Your Work” page that transparently show how they built any data analysis or other reporting that they’ve done. I’ve been following their work off-and-on for most of this year, but this story really jumped out to me.
Adrianne Jeffries, an investigative reporter at The Markup, and Leon Yin, an investigative data journalist at The Markup, teamed up on the story. (Full disclosure: Jeffries was the editor of both stories I wrote for the now-defunct publication The Outline.) As their backup explains, they took a sample data pool of 15,269 searches from topics appearing in Google Trends from November 2019 to January 2020 because there is no publicly available pool of Google search queries. They then categorized those by Google (including links driving to YouTube, which Google owns), non-Google, and AMP which are basically links from other websites optimized for mobile reading on Google.
The entire piece is revealing, but not entirely surprising. One of the main takeaways is that Google makes five times as much on advertising on their own properties as it does selling advertising on third-party properties. What is surprising, is just how much real estate is taken up by Google properties on search results pages.
First, there are the paid ads, then there is a knowledge panel (you know those light-teal shaded panels that now appear with definitions when you search something) that is drawn from a Google database, followed by even more knowledge panels, then you get to “people also ask” a classic Google content module that can be expanded and take up even more space, and then finally you get to an actual non-Google result. The Markup’s design team did a wonderful job of visualizing this, complete with a little tracker to show you how far you’ve scrolled before reaching a non-Google result.
Jeffries and Yin use a variety of examples to articulate just how Google’s boosting of its own content has led to decreasing traffic for competitors. Google Flights and Google Hotels being the prime example among them. They note that in 2019 those two Google-owned entities received nearly twice as many U.S. site visits as their competitors Expedia and Booking.com did.
There’s a reason Google was at the antitrust hearing! As Richard Nieva covered in CNET, out of all the tech companies called before Congress, Google is the most in danger of antitrust action. Nieva notes that there is an expected lawsuit coming from the Department of Justice at some point this summer. And meanwhile, as I’ve covered, there is mounting pressure from outside of the United States for Google to pay publishers to license the content they are in some cases suppressing.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: The movie Brick from 2005
One of the random, I wouldn’t say joys but pleasant surprises of spending most of my time indoors during COVID-19 has been the spur-of-the-moment decision to revisit old movies that I haven’t watched in a long time. This past weekend, the movie I revisited was Rian Johnson’s Brick from 2005.
Brick was Johnson’s directorial debut. He also wrote and produced the film, which apparently cost $500,000 to make, was shot in 20 days, and made 3.9 million dollars. I remember reading about the movie when I was in college and then being pleasantly surprised when it was showing at my local Loews on Long Island. A neo-noir thriller starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt of Third Rock from the Sun fame? I’m in! I’d obviously never heard of Rian Johnson so I had no idea what to expect. I remember loving the movie at the time and thinking of it fondly, but I hadn’t actively thought about for a long time.
So when my girlfriend and I wanted to watch a noir movie this weekend, but not an old noir movie (her words), I immediately thought of Brick. It’s fascinating to watch Brick in the wake of Johnson’s much-beloved Knives Out. That film was obviously a genre exercise, but an extraordinarily slick one. Brick feels like a true indie movie, which is to say it feels like it could have been made in the early 1970s. Watching it now, and looking at Johnson’s filmography, it’s amazing how pure and focused his catalog is. He goes from Brick to The Brothers Bloom, to directing an episode of the short-lived show Terriers and three classic episodes of Breaking Bad, to Looper, to The Last Jedi, to Knives Out.
The casting in the film is great, as are the performances and the rapid-fire, film noir lingo. Young Joseph Gordon-Levitt holds up as a hard-boiled protagonist, Nora Zehtner (remember her??) was surprisingly great as the femme fatale, Noah Fleiss was solid as the tortured thug Tug, and Lukas Haas’s The Pin was still creepy. And the movie is funny too—especially a great exchange about J.R.R. Tolkien that I had completely forgotten about.
The Action I’ve Taken
For the next few weeks, and maybe months, I’ll conclude each newsletter with a brief list of actions I’ve taken each week to help end police violence and to support an America that is free of racism. This isn’t meant to virtue signal or pat myself on the back—it’s merely meant to show my commitment to change. I won’t share any donation figures here but can provide them upon request.
Signed another petition to seek justice for Breonna Taylor.
Emailed law enforcement officials to demand that the men responsible for killing Breonna Taylor are brought to justice.