Journalism: November 2007 Archive Page

Douglas McLennan (Arts Journal):

Newspapers have not traditionally been mass market. In fact they were the classic niche subsidy model. The genius of newspapers was that they aggregated lots of mini-content - comics, bridge columns, stock tables, crossword puzzles, the arts, business, sports - and built enough of a combined audience to subsidize the content that otherwise would not have paid for itself.

I don't know a single journalist who got in the business because they wanted to make sure Garfield or Dear Abby got delivered every day, but the fact is that the content that journalists think counts most - coverage of city hall, foreign reporting, investigations - does not have a big enough audience to pay for itself on its own.

Yet somewhere along the way, this idea of niche aggregation slipped away from the local paper and was replaced by the sense that every story ought to be comprehensible by every reader. The problem: in a culture that increasingly offers more and more choice and allows people to get more precisely what they want, when they want, and how they want it, a generalized product that doesn't specifically satisfy anyone finds its audience erode away. The more general, the more broad, the more "mass culture" a newspaper tries to become, the faster its readers look elsewhere.

Tom Brokaw, via businessandmedia.org:

"I was at The Washington Post earlier today," Brokaw said. "And in the lobby they've got a wonderful graphic describing how the printing press works and where it is ... 75,000 copies an hour it can turn out. Its last run is at 2:15 in the morning and [has] an automatic paper roll that comes when they run out of paper and the ink is recharge and I looked at all that and I thought - 'Ten years from now, will it be here?' I don't know. Probably ... if you would do a hardcore analysis - probably not. It'll be probably digital 10 years from now."

Well, Google didn't say "glarbifulous" on its own, but I had a good reason to search the internet for a nonsense word.

In order to confirm my feeling that the Associated Press's preference for "Web log" is far less popular online than the traditional "weblog," I did a quick Google search.

12,900,000 Google hits for ["weblog"]

I expected that. For years, my own blog has been ranked anywhere from 99 to about 180 out of however many hits there are for "weblog," and I've been tracking that number every year when I submit my annual faculty report. I thought that maybe that number was a little lower than I remembered, but I realize that Google's numbers fluctuate as it re-indexes older sites.

I wasn't surprised when I found only a paltry

250,000 Google hits for ["web log"]

... since only AP writers format the term that way. But when I tried to exclude the AP articles that use "web log," I found... 

24,700,000 Google hits for ["web log" -AP]

Why do I get ten times more hits  for what should be a more restrictive search? 

The Googly weirdness does not stop there. When I include AP, why do I get 25,000 more hits than when I exclude it?

275,000 Google hits for ["web log" AP]

The nonsense word "glarbifulous" appears nowhere on the internet (though that will change once Google notices this post). I was quite surprised, then, to see that after excluding "glarbifulous" from my search, I find...

175,000,000 hits for [weblog -glarbifulous]

That's more than ten times as many sites as I get when I don't exclude the nonsense word. How can so many more pages NOT have a word that doesn't exist?

Maybe Google has paid closer attention to the quality of pages that contain the word "weblog," removing a lot of junk results that it figures are pointless. But maybe when I ask Google to do a search for something less popular, it thinks I might actually be interested in some of the sites it would otherwise ignore. Suddenly, every single page in its database that doesn't include "glarbifulous" becomes potentially relevant, since each of those pages has met a criterion that I have specified.

That seems to make sense, but it also seems, well, twisted. I just did a search for "the" by itself, and "the -glarbifulous" and got similar results.... about twice as many hits for the more restrictive search.

There's not a whole lot more to this short article from the Press Gazette, but it's another sign of Google's power:

Google is "hugely dangerous" and is one of the major preoccupations of News Corp, according to the editor-in-chief of Times Online.

Anne Spackman, speaking as part of a panel about the future of newspapers at the Society of Editors conference, said "the number one topic of conversation at News Corp is Google."

"Its move into DNA is a massive threat and I wonder whether we will all start feeling that they are behaving a bit too much like big brother," she said.

In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Jonathan D. Silver waxes poetic:

Where do all the pumpkins go, post Halloween's big costume show?
Are they left to rot and molder, as the weather trends ever colder?
Or is there some more organized scheme, to dispose of leftovers that aren't the crop's cream?
Wherefore do they, might they go? Inquiring minds want to know!

Silver is a clever writer, though his meter could be tighter.
It could use another edit, but I'm smiling 'cause I read it.