NYC Media Lab Notes:

Google’s Richard Gingras on the future of news

On April 2nd, 2015, IESE Business School’s New York campus on West 57th Street hosted an event featuring Richard Gingras, Head of News & Social Products at Google. Gingras was interviewed by Bill Baker, President Emeritus of WNET and a long time media executive, and now also an academic associated with Fordham and IESE. Here are some notes from the talk.

On the origins of Google News

Google News operates what Gingras says is “the largest “go-away” site on the internet. “We send 10 billion visits a month to news sites globally.” The site got its start in response to a major news event. “Google News was created right after 9/11 by an engineer who wanted to keep up with the story and get a broad sense of perspective. That was the mission, with any story, to give you diverse news.” So if you look up the Iran nuclear negotiations you’re just as likely to get news from an Israeli source as an Iranian one.

These days, like the rest of Google, the News team is encouraged to think big. “Larry’s big message to us constantly is think 10x, think beyond the current; that is our only hope to be successful in the future.” But Gingras admitted the company has made some missteps with regard to some recent developments. “We’re just as subject as anyone else to missing key trends. The speed of mobile, we missed that. We also missed the powerful trends in social, where frankly we’re catching up. That’s an ongoing challenge.”

On the business of journalism

Gingras believes existing news companies have to work hard to adapt to a new environment. “The modern corporate culture was designed for consistency and predictability; that’s the opposite of what we need.”

Google plays a big role in the news business, but Gingras believes for people to understand its role they need to look again at the ecosystem itself. “With traditional publishing companies I sense that there has been a long held belief that the Internet is an extension of their distribution system. If you think that way you think of it as an extension of your market. But it’s an entirely new market unto itself. So many things have changed. People are consuming more news than they ever have before in the history of civilization.”

The modern corporate culture was designed for consistency and predictability; that’s the opposite of what we need.

Search, aggregation, social, these are the tools of the day. “With these tools, the Huffington Post went from zero to 200 million uniques, and BuzzFeed is going even faster than that; the entrepreneurs that understand how to take advantage of these dynamics will thrive.”

Google is naturally creating value in the ecosystem by funneling visitors to news sites, who the monetize the traffic. But Gingras is concerned about the strength of business models for journalism. “I do consider this something that is important for us to think about. Google Search only has value to the extent it searches a rich knowledge ecosystem. It’s every important we have a vast and sustainable ecosystem for news.” But Gingras doesn’t believe established business models are necessarily broken. “It’s just whether the old models are attached to products that people value. It’s a different market.”

Certainly things have changed since the hay day of the American newspaper, when news companies in local markets had near monopoly control over local ad pricing.

“That model worked,” says Gingras, but “any media product is a child of the distribution system it lives in. That model began to degrade with the introduction of cable. The internet blew it up substantially.” These days, says Gingras, “it’s not about the business model, it’s about the products you put out there, and is your cost structure tuned to that.”

Any media product is a child of the distribution system it lives in.

Gingras believes the future is bright for journalism. “I think the future of journalism will be better than its past and for the most part it already is. The internet is the first amendment brought to life. We are enabling participants in the journalistic discussion that were very hard to accommodate in past.”

On the importance of data to journalism

Driving Gingras’s optimism is his belief in new technologies to extend journalism into new areas and create more valuable information.

“The one I feel hugely optimistic about is the use of data journalism. We have to think about how does the form change. There are journalistic services we can provide if you think about the technology and services in different ways. An article with nice charts is a nice thing to do, but it can be more than that.” Gingras sites an example from Pro Publica, an investigation into the state of dialysis centers. The investigation led Pro Publica to launch a website on dialysis featuring an ongoing knowledge utility with ongoing, evergreen, persistent value to the audience. That product is in and of itself sustainable. “Pro Publica has a great revenue line associated with data.”

News companies need to invest in their ability to interrogate data. “I believe in the power of the press to hold institutions to account. We need journalism to have the same deep data capabilities to play that role.”

Gingras funneled some of his thinking about the future of journalism into The Trust Project, described in a paper published with Sally Lehrman. The Trust Project “starts with an underlying observation that we live today in an ecosystem that is exponentially richer than the past but is a confusing maelstrom.” In this environment, the New York Times competes on equal footing with corporate advocacy sites spinning issues. “The old model- trust us because we’re the Times, Le Monde, El Pais or La Stampa- is no longer valid.”

To build trust, Gingras believes journalistic organizations need to think about methods to expose the processes that ensure the credibility and value of their work. Typically ‘behind the scenes’ activities such as legal review, the work of editors and researchers, and other processes that are part of the work flow should be made public and somehow published with the news product. Gingras believes we need to “rethink the architecture of the article to give us more background, the background of the journalist, the process of the lawyer approving the article, more structured approaches to citations, the hard work that does take place.” Currently these signals of credibility are not clear, but in future they might differentiate a journalist’s work from, say, a blogger’s opinion.

In many other parts of the news sphere, Gingras asserts, “the truth is there is too much news. It’s hard to convince me I should pay for information about the Boston Red Sox.” But for specialized information, it is possible to extract a premium price. “I can go anywhere for sports scores, but if I’m a fantasy fan and I want the data I’ll pay for it.” To take advantage of such opportunities, news companies need to forget about the old world order and think about the new marketplace for information. Gingras called out an investigative journalism project at Le Monde and a project by The New York Times to build a business around cooking and recipes, with separate sites and applications, as examples of news organizations taking advantage of this opportunity.

What’s needed is a change of mindset

To survive in the future, Gingras argued, news companies need to figure out how to “leverage assets that have value.” But, that “requires a different thought process that starts with assessing the market.” For many legacy companies, that will require quite a lot of change.

Justin Hendrix is Executive Director of NYC Media Lab. Reach him at justin [dot] hendrix [at] nycmedialab [dot] org or follow him on Twitter @justinhendrix.