After 987 days of trials leading to three crushing monopoly losses, it’s easy to conclude that Google owns the open web.
It has 91 per cent of search, earns US$350 billion-a-year, serves 13 billion targeted ads every day, and banks the earnings of every news publisher combined every three days.
Search, Chrome, YouTube and its ad tech are the four legs of a table directing almost everything that more than four billion people read and watch every day.
But in part two of our chat with Richard Gingras, Google’s longtime news policy lead, he continues to push back on the Google-owned web argument. (Part one’s here.)
It was the internet that widened choice, he says, Google just organised it. The deeper story, he argues, is that news recklessly let go of trust and relevance with its audience.
And while he’s sympathetic to journalism’s civic role, he’s blunt on its economics: News has “zero commercial value” because advertisers don’t want it.
And when Google throttled news in Australia and Canada during regulatory standoffs, no-one noticed - something he says that was noticed at the Googleplex.
He recently quit Google to find a solution, and his remedy is building local news - what he calls “the fat middle” - serving moderate community content to rebuild habits.
This is the conclusion of a near-two-hour podcast where he tore the Band-Aid off the most hotly debated topic in news over the past quarter century: Dig Google kill news?
Not us he says. You did it to yourself…
“Google frankly - and people can disagree - was much more thoughtful about being willing to collaborate. That’s been harder recently because the two by fours keep coming at our heads.”
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The Big Story: Why Google thinks people don’t value news
Future Media podcast co-host Alan Chapell and I have spent what feels like countless hours covering the three Google antitrust trials.
And the way Google spoke in their court documents felt to us like it believed it controls the open web.
Even if that wasn’t the strategic intent, it has been the outcome as it dominates search, Chrome, video and programmatic advertising.
That’s where we started the second part of our interview with the former head of Google News and the architect of the Google News Initiative Richard Gingras.
Ricky: When you add all four legs together, Google’s propping up the entire table.
The responsibility, the implications of what that means for four or five billion people, the weight on Google must be enormous.
Gingras: “OK, and I think it’s always been that way. My experience (at Google) was entirely on the product side, on policy matters, and efforts relating to news.
“Not that I don’t understand other dynamics of what was going on, but I think there’s a whole lot more nuance to what you said than I think you suggested.
“When I hear people say Google’s search engine controls the gateway to people’s knowledge for news, I reply, not really.
“Basically, the internet has given people more choice and diversity than ever before. And in my work with regard to news, that was the objective.
“Some people say I drank the Kool-Aid, but I’ve never worked with more thoughtful, principled people than I worked with at Google search.
“They fully recognised the challenges, and it was constant change. When it came to ranking (search results) the mission’s never accomplished.
“The environment changes. The culture changes. What people put on the web changes. How people manage websites changes. Who’s trying to trick us with SEO...
“That means it’s the good guys and the bad guys who are trying to trick us. It’s an ongoing challenge.
“We were going to talk at the beginning of this podcast about the birth of Google News. The birth was a brilliant engineer out of India, Krishna Bharat.
“He came to the United States, studied at Georgia Tech, came to Google and then 9/11 happened.
“He thought: Gee, I’d like a broader sense of this story from around the world than what I’m getting just from my domain.
“The idea for Google News was to bring all those perspectives and sources into a place such that people have access to them, and it was brilliant at that.
“There was brilliance in a lot of the work that was done, and some of it I was involved in. I’m not trying to take credit. I worked with smarter people than I.
“We would look at a news query and decide what to do with it. How do we give people the latest news, and adjust for the depth of knowledge for that user?
“Some (people) are following the story intently and want the latest. Some don’t know, and want to find an explainer? Are there backgrounder interviews?
“Search pivots to help different dimensions and vectors of the query because we don’t know exactly what the user’s intent or knowledge is.
“So, I grimace when people say Google’s the gateway to the internet.
“One thing about Google search that’s not true for most of the rest of society - social, health, police etc - is its search shows the results of every query to you.
“We show not only the first page (of results) but the following hundred pages if you want to, and it’s available for people to analyse.
“We always encouraged academic research because it gave us useful criticism or it bore out that we were doing a good job of surfacing diversity around queries.
“And diversity really mattered. Our reputation is sacred. The degree of trust in Google is huge. We couldn’t ever be seen as having an editorial perspective.”
Alan: How does everything you’ve said jibe with last summer’s experiment in Europe when Google shut off search going to news sites?
Flashback:
Gingras: “Yeah, we’ve done several of those experiments. We did some in Australia around the time of the bargaining code, and in Canada during C-18.
“One reason frankly, was that we wanted our own best assessment of what would happen if news wasn’t part of search
“The Canadian government with C-18 basically said we no longer had fair use for news links and headlines.
I went to Ottawa and said: That’s a mistake. Facebook will pull out because news doesn’t matter to them.
And they did, and user satisfaction went up. Engagement did not go down. (Read my series Inside Zuck’s Brain to understand his decision.)
“I told the Canadian politicians that they were creating a demotivating Google from providing as many links to stories as possible.
“So, we did those tests. I went to Canada when we did them to explain it to the government.
“We figured removing news would be noticed right away. We did it for two to three per cent of the population and guess what? It didn’t get noticed for 10 days. Which is its own message.”
Ricky: You’re saying that news has no value to consumers. Is that what your data was telling you?
Gingras: “It’s not just our data. You can look at a lot of third-party research. The Reuters Institute has consistently done excellent research on this over the years.”
Ricky: But that was your conclusion?
Gingras: “In any society around the world, the percentage that’s interested in what we would call serious news is down in the single digits.
“I can tell you that our percentage with regard to news queries was even less.
“Google search is useful on so many things you come to it daily, but news is haphazard. It’s a more intermittent interest.
“And on the monetisation side, one thing you learn at Google is the value of different types of content, which we can interpret as the value of the query.
“What is the economic value of a news query? It’s negligible. It’s like almost zero. In fact, I think it is if you’re rounding up. It would be zero.
“If you look at a travel query, there’s a lot of value. There are ads in it for people looking for a vacation.
“And when content is licensed for AI, it will be in valuable areas like travel.
“Google can predict the revenue, so it needs good travel information. Google needs relationships with the booking engines and it will make those happen.
“But if you go to news, there’s an absence of commercial value.”
I’ve been tracking this trend with British researcher Authoritas since AI Overviews began, and our exclusive research clearly shows this Google’s preferencing.
High yielding ad categories travel, health, horoscopes and shopping all over index, and are rising, while news and sport is tiny and falling further.
Want access to the full data based on billions of queries taken from the world largest publishers? Drop me a line.
Ricky: Clearly, you’re very smart and you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. And you have access to data that Alan and I don’t, but I would argue over the word value.
If value’s measured as money, then you’re right. If the value is measured as society, you’re fundamentally wrong.
I’d argue the reason your political situation is so broken is because you’ve silenced voices. (Your algorithm) has stopped moderate information that challenges the polarised narrative being spread.
“The result is that you’re either this or that, but the world isn’t a one or a zero. It’s not just right or left. It’s a million different things.
As a war correspondent, I sat with soldiers on both sides who’ll all argue they’re 100 per cent right, but they’re not. They’re versions of a right based on a perspective.
Which means that if (Google) creates a product where value is measured by money, it creates problems.
Google’s also an AI company, and I’ve founded an AI company too, so I can see where this goes.
If you allow numbers to make decisions that determine what’s valuable, because of how a person clicks, it’s the equivalent of giving everybody in the world a pen and expecting them to be Shakespeare.
The machine eventually breaks when it hits critical mass.
Gingras: “But wait a second. I’m not saying that news and journalism don’t have societal value, and nor would Sundar Pichai (Google’s CEO).
“I did say it doesn’t have commercial value - and that’s not just in search, that’s in general. You can see that.
“Obviously, news organisations used to make a whole lot of money off soft content. They can’t make it any more because of the competition of the internet.
“Now they’re left with just news, and it’s hard to monetise.
“The fact it has no commercial value didn’t stop Google from investing a lot in trying to do the right thing though.
“Now, on your point that it’s blocking voices, I’d like to go there because I’m not sure what you mean.
“The newspaper industry in any country has way more political influence than Google. Look at the bargaining code legislation that came about.”
“And the European copyright directive. That was driven by Axel Springer, a very sophisticated publisher and a very sophisticated player in the political sphere.
“Similarly with News Corp.
“If there’s a weakness of Google in the policy sphere, it’s that Google’s a bunch of logicians.
“I remember briefing Larry (Page, one of the two original Google founders) about the first link tax (in 2013). It was in Germany and called Leistungsschutzrecht.
“I got to page three and Larry looked at me and said: This makes no sense. I told him he was right from a structural perspective, but policy isn’t about logic.
“Logic typically doesn’t get invited into the room; it doesn’t get access to the microphone. It’s competition of interest.
“And as I pointed out, in any country on Earth, there’s far more political weight and influence in the publishing industry than there is with Google.”
Ricky: I think that was true, but isn’t true any more.
Gingras: “I’m sure it’s diminishing.
“An observation hit me last Fall in Berlin. I was going to dinner with a friend who worked for Axel Springer. She doesn’t any more.
“We were walking and what struck me was there were no newsstands in the streets. None. Evaporated. And that’s not unique to Germany or to Berlin.
“I realised what had been lost. Bild’s the largest circulation newspaper in Europe and the most influential in Germany. A tabloid blaring headlines every day.
“Those newsstands had the blaring headline of Build. You didn’t need to buy Bild, or read it. You didn’t even need to respect it, but its message was put in your head.
“They had this massively influential billboard network across Germany simply based on their presence on newsstands, and that disappeared.
“It’s not surprising that News Corp and Axel Springer have seen their influence diminish because they don’t have the mechanisms they had before.
“I often look at those political battles by News Corp and Axel Springer and others. I don’t say this to be critical, but it was really a war against the internet.
“The internet created a far more competitive environment, far more voices.
“So going back to your point on limiting voices, I honestly don’t understand your point.”
Ricky: The internet has silenced voices and I’ll explain why...
Gingras: The internet can’t silence anyone, so be specific. It’s an open protocol.”
Ricky: It’s complicated, so I’ll try to nail it precisely.
More than the world’s news organisations have closed in the past decade and ~58 per cent of journalists are gone.
The internet removed the commercial structures that enabled professional media organisations to operate.
That also removed the checks and balances, and the professional editors who ensured we avoided the anarchy of information where anything can be published.
News organisations were governed to publish information that was true, or legal. They had to follow laws around defamation, contempt and national security.
The news published maybe 20 or 30 years ago met a series of regulations and structures, so it wasn’t as polarising.
I can tell you with certainty as I ran the largest newsdesk of the largest news brand in the English-speaking world then.
Page one might be a scoop, then some entertainment, then a political story quoting the British Prime Minister, then an opinion column by the leader of the opposition.
The outcome was that people knew what they were getting, and they knew that they could rely on it, and trust it. They didn’t need to like it, but they knew what it was.
That facilitated a more informed discourse.
Later, I ran video at the Sydney Morning Herald when a board member bought cameraphones for all the reporters.
“They can shoot video of everything,” he told me. I asked him whether we should give all the readers a pen and see what newspaper they wrote for us.
I’m adamant that you end up with chaos with bigger is always better approach. Sometimes you don’t need more, you need rules and refinement.
If you give everyone access to everything, you end up with anarchy, and that’s what I worry we’re headed into, and it’s why we’re seeing a splintering of the web.
Gingras: “A couple of small points because I really would like to get to the bigger question you have there.
“I’m not sure I buy the notion that in the world of print, there was less polarisation or partisanship on the part of newspapers.
“In my experience, looking at the tabloid newspapers in London 30 years ago, as well as New York, you pretty much had a clue as to what their position was.
“The Daily Mail versus the Independent, blah, blah, blah, but that’s a minor point and that’s looking backward. It’s really about how do we look forward.
“I’d also say on what you said about there being 58 per cent fewer journalists. There’s something you have to look at there.
“Someone at the San Jose Mercury News told me they once had a newsroom of 600 people and now it’s 150.
“To be factual, it had people writing movie reviews and people writing food columns - all soft content for soft sections.
“They moved on because newspapers cut their staffs, to your point, but many of them went to other niche publications on the net.
“But your core question is a fair one. How does society support a journalistic press in the serious areas where we think it’s crucial for democracy and an open society?
“That’s a very fair question, but the answers are complex. Some of the answers are also potentially problematic.
“The Center for News, Technology and Innovation, the policy research institute that I helped found with Maria Ressa and Marty Baron, held a conference recently.
“I gave the opening remarks and my point was to be careful of the false messiahs. Philanthropy isn’t going to support you, I said. Public policy isn’t going to save you.
“Government funding isn’t going to support you either; and if it does, beware, because that’s kind of dangerous.”
Ricky: This is what I created this pod for - to stitch together this currently broken narrative to create a bridge of understanding to a future that’s better for everyone.
It’s obvious to me that the world is better off if we all tech and media collaborate. Our shared North Star should be a better outcome for all humanity.
A broken internet, a splinternet, feels bad, a retrograde step in our evolution.
The mass commercialisation of the open web has done a lot of damage.
A plurality of voices without rules has broken international laws, and
That’s caused chaos and madness - and polarisation is the end result.
So, all of these things being true, what do you suggest we do about it? What’s the best way to a more hopeful future?
Gingras: “I don’t lean too hard on the notion that somehow we all have to come together as society and rah, rah, rah go forward. I don’t see it as practical.”
Ricky: I’m not talking about every person. I’m talking about the tech industry and the media industry. There needs to be an alignment of vision.
Gingras: “There’s one of those memes again. I don’t like the phrase Big Tech. I don’t like the phrase platforms because it’s simplistic.
“If you want to talk about specific dimensions of the tech industry, let’s do so.
“There are myriad companies so what do we mean by platforms?
“Search is a very distinct and different thing from a social network, which is also distinct from how Apple manages its walled garden.
“I think Google frankly - and you know people can disagree - was much more thoughtful about being willing to collaborate.
“Unfortunately, that’s been much harder recently because as Google said it wanted to try new things, the two by fours (planks of wood) kept coming at our heads.
“How do we get comfortable with that?
“But back to solutions. I do believe that when I look at polarised environments, it’s about trying to build a fatter middle.
“I think about it in several ways.
“We have some extreme partisan media entities. Can we have more media entities with a philosophy and objectivity to reach across the spectrum?
“If you deeply research the lack of trust, an insight is that some people say news organisations are arrogant - and keep at them with what they need us to hear.
“Maybe publishers need to be more humble. Can they be better in providing more context about things?
“It bleeds, it leads. OK, there were two murders in Brooklyn, but is that a dangerous trend or an anomaly?
“Maybe it’d be helpful to also study linguistics and news. There was some excellent research on the George Floyd situation in Minneapolis about this.”
Gingras is referring to Janet Coats’ paper Choose Your Words Wisely: The Role of Language in Media Trust.
“She said protesters had these interesting pairings of words like ignite, erupt, explode….
“It’s common to say protests erupted, or protests ignited, but those are terms of conflict. It suggests the protests weren’t peaceful when they were.
“Politicians spend immense amounts of money on linguistics to learn which word pairings work best. Maybe journalism should be thinking about that as well?
“This drove me up the wall. The (US) administration was bringing troops into cities based on a perception of high crime.
“Someone used data to show Chicago crime compared to Houston or Jacksonville was not at all the same. It was much higher in those cities.
“The local publication in Chicago reported that data with a headline saying: Sorry, Trump, you’re wrong.
“That turned off 43 per cent of the population who won’t go beyond the headline because they think it’s fake news - because of the expressed partisanship.
“As journalists, we need to step back and question how we approach these things differently given the different world we’re living in.”
Gingras has set out to find a solution. He’s chairing a local news media outlet called Village Media in Canada, and shares his opinions.
Gingras: “Village Media has refined the notion of what a local media entity can be to its community.
“The word community is important. Cities have villages that are communities.
“It might be a community of 80,000 people. It might be working class. A community to us is a section of a major metropolitan area.
“We have Toronto Today, which is the downtown core where 300,000 people live and work. Toronto Today covers only that area.
“We’re very conscious about assessing the information needs of a community, and we find people want to know what’s going on in their neighbourhood.
“That might be who’s fixing the potholes, or the snowstorm last night and whether the school’s going to close?
“What’s going on in the community park this weekend? There’s a new restaurant opening, can I afford it?
“Village puts focus on what people call service journalism. It’s not just the watchdog journalism, it’s everything else.
“A better phrase for service journalism is cohesion journalism, because it creates the shared reality.
“We all care about the potholes. We all have very different perspectives about the politics.
“A lot of research says that if you want to help a community engage on controversial issues, then build your trust on non-controversial topics.
“The editorial focus of Village is to do right by service journalism, do right by watchdog journalism and do it with impartiality.
“And don’t be afraid to celebrate the community’s hopes and dreams. You’re not just a town scold. That means covering the heartwarming story…
“The result is very deep engagement. Twenty five per cent of the population visits almost every day.”
He says the work has identified key pillars.
There’s civic engagement. We have a team that builds relationships with local institutions, like the chamber of commerce or the hospital. We work together to address problems.
“We do random acts of kindness. If a person loses her wheelchair, we step in and work with the dealer and others to find the money to buy a new one. Then we cover it to show how the community cares for each other.
“Village doesn’t consider itself a news media company any more. It’s a community impact organisation.
“Last year we introduced Spaces, a community interest network. Like Reddit for locals done with polish.
It’s about hobbies and interests. Guys who like maintaining classic cars can meet others who might be from indigenous tribes, or French Quebec, or moved from India, who are all interested in classic cars.
“We also want to grow the economy, and that’s the advertising. We’re very thoughtful about our ad products.
“We don’t do subscriptions. It’s free, no paywalls, but the model sees merchants subscribing because we give them access to the community they serve.
“At that local level, advertising is information. It’s not Exxon greenwashing.
“When we asked people what drove them to consume local news, the main reason was to save money and know where the best deals are. That drives our business model.
“Now we’ve just started to explore the notion of pulling those pieces together on important issues.
“That means using our newsroom to research what issues the community feels need to be addressed. We’re running one now on opioids in a working class area.
“We then pulled together all the stakeholders in the community for a day to talk about what they were doing, and the newsroom reported on it.
“Next we’re going to bring together our version of citizen assemblies - bringing people together to engage and interact with those stakeholders.
“We’ll report on that too, and then do research to see whether we’re having an impact.
“The point is to see whether we can empower communities to address their own challenges and strengthen - not only through journalistic coverage, but themselves.
“How do we enable the community to solve the problems themselves?
“It’s a modern digital operating system for a community, and that’s an audacious thing to try to do.
“But if I look at your question about how we evolve journalism to meet the needs of society, and leverage it to bring polarised communities together, there are things we can do.
“It’s why I left Google. I wanted to get my hands dirty in this stuff. And it’s wonderfully exciting because we’re building things.
“I’m not spending time with politicians in a highly polarised political environment.”
Ricky: I have one last question. It returns to something you mentioned earlier that’s the opposite of what I’ve heard, so I’d like your interpretation.
You said we need a fatter middle. Can you explain that?
Gingras: “My sense is that it’s going to be hard to bring over the extremes, so you want a moderate middle.
“Many people voted because they’re worried about money, concerned about the economy, and had doubts about the effectiveness of government.
“That’s why I talk about the fat middle. We don’t get ourselves out of this mess if we simply double down on the extremes.”
Ricky: Most people are predicting a collapse of the middle. Big news brands like The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and NY Times will survive - and perhaps thrive as they have sufficient infrastructure to build the subscriptions, events and other monetisation streams, supported by direct sales.
Across the middle though, the Gannetts and the middle market, programmatic ad-funded local and regional brands, they’re the ones that are dying off fastest.
Then at the other end of the spectrum you have thousands of reporters leaving those newsrooms to start a Substack or a podcast creating masses of new media.
My shorthand is that we have a small number of mass media brands that will survive at one end and masses of media at the other - and the middle is dying.
If your aim here is to have a fatter middle to create a plurality of voices and the nuance that comes with moderate reporting, well, that’s the piece ending fastest.
Gingras: “It’s dying for several reasons.
“One is a lack of vision. If you look at the major metropolitan dailies, I always felt they were the most vulnerable.
“They’re no longer relevant for national news because you get it elsewhere, and they’re not local enough to be relevant to the communities they serve.
“Look at the Chicago Sun-Times. It still exists, but its print circulation is like 30,000. So that’s gone.
“That’s why I think what we’re doing with Village can spread fast and wide everywhere.
“Wiser politicians know that all politics is local. If you’re not winning by bringing people together locally, you’ll never do it nationally.
“So much news is national now. It’s much easier to drive memes at that level. It’s much easier to drive fear.
“I’d like to think major publications could help address that, but even The New York Times on its best day only serves a small portion of society.
“I think we need to reinvent things at a baseline. That’s not easy, but if you’re thorough in the analysis, I don’t know how you come to a different conclusion.
“And if you do, I’d love to know it because I’ve spent too many decades trying to figure it out.”
Ricky: This has been the longest and perhaps most thought-provoking podcast we’ve done so far. Thanks for volunteering so much of your time.
Wow, there’s a lot in there to grind your mind over the weekend. See you next week.
