Murdoch to Google: Search This:
“No, what Murdoch has realized is that a newspaper is not just valuable for the individual stories or tidbits that can be culled, piecemeal, from a generic list. A newspaper provides context. It tells a story through its selection of articles for a given day, their juxtaposition, and even their flow over time.
By opening themselves up to immediate vivisection-by-search, news organizations invite the disconnection of their articles from their context and their source. And the more they encourage their content to be parsed in this way, the more they encourage readers to look at the work of their journalists as mere datapoints, isolated from a greater perspective. Like what ringtones are to music.”
Finally, someone gets it.
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{ 13 comments }
@ianbetteridge really interesting, points at a system of contextualised searh results – that days big story, weather, politics etc…?
@ianbetteridge iTunes didn’t kill the album when it created the singles biz… How is this different?
@ianbetteridge surely an article referenced to its source, date, time etcc can be easily contextualised against other variables?
@ianbetteridge I really shouldn’t argue with a journo about this should I
[New Post] Finally, someone gets it – http://www.technovia.co.uk/2009/11/murdo...
@PeterNBiddle I think the record companies would beg to differ on that!
@mik3yb The question being “can an algorithm match the judgement of a human editor?”
Rushkoff is right: there is a place for in-depth, properly edited, contextual paid-for content on the web. The problem for publishers is that they’ve spent years dragging their online news downmarket in search of traffic (the Telegraph’s @budget balls-up being a good example) so they can feed the stats to advertisers. Re-inventing online brands so that they are perceived as being worth paying for will be very, very tricky.
@mik3yb Those are very, very narrow “contexts”.
(OT, @PeterNBiddle) Chalk and cheese: iTunes didn’t create the singles business, singles mostly stand alone without their album’s context. The singles business already existed and record labels tried to displace it with the albums business (for great profit?).
Kenny – totally. Tricky, but if they’re going to do it now is the best time.
@ianbetteridge well of course… And yet there are still albums
Never particularly been a Murdoch-hater myself. The guy has a lot of balls and is one of the few people in publishing who has the courage to put a ton of money where his mouth is, which is why he’s as successful as he is. Whatever your opinion of his newspapers, magazines and websites, he’s trying to do something different, totally against the flow. His ideas may well define the next decade in publishing. Actually, maybe he should take over from Steve Jobs.