A Slew of Google Stories
Good morning!
Welcome to this week’s edition of Are You Engaged? I’m in Week 7 of my quarantine. I have not started, learned, or experimented with any new hobbies. But I have made this chicken recipe twice—and it’s been good each time!
Before we get to the heart of the newsletter this week, I wanted to continue the throughline of ecommerce or affiliate content that I covered in last week’s edition. Last Thursday, Deadline reported that NBCUniversal was unveiling its new digital storefront called NBCUniversal Checkout that will let audiences instantly click and buy items they see on NBCUniversal channels on the company’s owned and operated platforms rather through another site. Their plans include expanding it to any NBCUniversal editorial content and I’m interested to see how that takes shape.
In media employment news, last Friday, Poynter reported that a round of layoffs were underway at Gannett. Exact figures are not available as of yet, but these layoffs come after the company had already announced a first round of furloughs and cost-saving measures at the end of March.
On the hiring end of the spectrum—but still very grim—CNN ran a comprehensive story this past weekend looking at the increased need for writers on the obituaries desks at newsrooms across the country, as publications look to put more resources behind properly honoring and telling the stories of those who have passed away due to COVID-19. One obviously hopes for increased hiring at journalism outlets vs. mass layoffs—but hiring to fill a need of this kind is disheartening to say the least.
And for some good news, last week, Report For America (a nonprofit organization working to place emerging journalists in newsrooms in need) announced its 2020 reporting corps. This group, composed of 225 journalists, will work in 162 newsrooms across the country. Additionally, the organization reported a new round of support from the Facebook Journalism Project in the form of a $2.5 million donation.
This week, I want to do a quick review of a few stories about Google and its relationship to publishers that have come out over the past month.
The first is one that I find incredibly fascinating, if a bit technical and probably over my head overall. In early April, TechCrunch and NiemanLab reported news out of France that the country’s competition authority was ordering Google to negotiate with French news organizations to determine a means of paying them for headlines and portions of text that appear in Google searches.
This order stems from the 2019 copyright reforms put into place by the EU, specifically an article outlining that tech companies would now be responsible for acquiring licenses from rights holders to host content on their platforms. The first thought was that these new legal reforms would hurt platforms specializing in UGC (user-generated content) like Facebook and Instagram. But, by its very nature of surfacing content from other sources, Google is just as susceptible.
And that is being proven true now. As TechCrunch reports, Google has attempted to update the Google News display in France to avoid snippets of text and headlines, but the French Competition, in ordering Google to negotiate payment with publishers, has clearly seen through those efforts.
France isn’t alone in putting pressure on Google. Last Thursday, BuzzFeed News reported that Australia is joining the push, as the country’s government is making it known they want both Google and Facebook to pay for using and repurposing journalism in their newsfeeds and across their properties. With the volume of journalism that is shared on Facebook and that is surfaced on Google, having both of the companies pay for licensing could be a huge benefit for newsrooms all over the globe as the entire industry continues through the well-documented dire straits it is currently in.
With the discussion of copyright usage and licensing payments as the background, TechCrunch’s story last week on Google seemingly abandoning plans to allow browsers to tip and donate to news organizations, individual writers, and musicians again paints the company in a less than flattering light. The TechCrunch story, full of scrapped designs that were confirmed to be legitimate by Google, is a fascinating look into how Google potentially could have positioned itself as an ally to journalists and publishers across the world. (Note: I really, really, recommend reading the piece and examining the screenshots just to see how this all could have worked.)
Patreon in many ways already serves as a tipping system for individual writers and creatives, and sites like Popula have already rolled out a tip function for their readers to engage with to support contributors. But having this done at Google’s scale would have gone a long way to promoting this kind of consumer behavior and engagement.
Yet, Google can’t necessarily be completely painted as the bad guy. In 2018, Google launched their News Initiative in an effort to help publishers earn money and to fight disinformation. The company pledged to spend $300 million over three years to support publishers. Looking at their March review, $6.5 million of that overall fund was used to prevent disinformation surrounding COVID-19.
In April, Google in partnership with McClatchy (the national publishing company that owns and operates dozens of local daily newspapers), launched The Longmont Leader—the second newsroom created as part of The Compass Experiment, which is meant to be a laboratory for building local news outlets.
Now, I’m not an expert on the Centennial State, but I’ve been to Colorado several times and I’ve never heard of Longmont. I imagine many people haven’t. So the fact that Google is working in partnership with a news publisher like McClatchy to build the infrastructure and provide jobs to journalists at a super local level is encouraging.
But overall, as you can see, where Google stands overall in relationship to truly supporting publishers and journalists is hard to decipher. It appears that they are leaning into smaller but meaningful gestures to help news out at a local level. And that is great and necessary and admirable. However, it seems that when it comes to discussing or moving forward on ways to support publishers at a macro and international-level—whether through shipping a direct tipping product or through establishing licensing payments to publishers—Google isn’t quite ready to be as generous.
In the case of paying licensing fees, Google is acting the way most consumers have always acted when it comes to journalism—they don’t want to pay for what they’ve already gotten for free. And maybe that’s probably why media outlets even need a company like Google to save it in the first place.
A Little Bit of Culture:
Each week I end the newsletter with a brief ode/rant/riff on a bit of culture I’m passionate about. It might be music, it might be movies or TV, it might be a book, and sometimes it might be related to sports. Once a month, I’ll go a little longer on something.
This week: Derry Girls
One of the truly bright spots of my time in quarantine (when not rewatching Lost, but more on that another time) has been discovering the British sitcom Derry Girls. The show originally ran on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, but both of it’s seasons are available to stream on Netflix. The story is set in the titular Northern Ireland town Derry in the 1990s and takes place during The Troubles. With that horrible conflict serving as the backdrop, Derry Girls plays as a kind of Irish version of Malcolm in the Middle. The show is ostensibly set around the Quinn family and their oldest daughter Erin, but there really is no true main character in the way that Malcolm was the centerpiece of Malcolm in the Middle. The similarities come from the fact that the Quinns are a middle class family that live in a house that overflows with energy and chaos—namely from Erin and her group of friends. The performances are amazing across the board and I found myself laughing out loud at times. (Note: I hardly laugh out loud at anything on TV.) But special shouts go to Erin’s cousin Orla (just watch her facial expressions and background reactions in every scene—truly amazing character acting), her beleaguered father Gerry (he’s no Bryan Cranston in Malcolm, but he’s putting in phenomenal work), and Erin’s blabbering Uncle Colm (who speaks in mesmerizing Irish colloquialisms and asides that I can only compare to the speaking style of the unnamed narrator in “The Cyclops” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses). The show is a true delight that packs a surprisingly emotional punch at the end of Season 2. I can’t wait for Season 3.
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