Technology

If Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s crystal ball is good enough to predict the future five years out, here’s what we could be looking at, news delivery-wise, a scant half-decade from now. Cue the wavy lines.

You’ll be holding some sort of portable device in your hands—a tablet, a smart phone, some sort of hybrid—who knows? In any event, on this portable device, the great electronic volksgemeinschaft we call the internet will deliver to you, one story at a time, content from your favorite newspapers and magazines; the images crisp as if they were delivered to you in old fashioned tangible print, sans excessive load time. Not only that, since the device knows who you are, what you like, and what you’ve already read—or presumably viewed—it serves up, automatically, stories related to or pertaining to the one on which you’re currently grooving. You like the suggestion, you check the box, a la Pandora, and the magical newsreader in your excited little mitts learns and loves you just a bit more.

In Schmidt’s model, some of the content delivered to you is handled via a monthly subscription package, while other content consists of the pearls and cockleshells you discover on your own, perhaps through search engines like Schmidt’s own Google. Some of that content would be delivered to you free of charge, while some of it would cost pennies to purchase—the purchase, of course, would be handled seamlessly. And since there’s no such thing as a free lunch (the oldest saws are usually the truest ones), that free content will be delivered to you encased in a neat package of advertisements, albeit ads “tailored” just for you.

An aside: ads “tailored just for me?” I hate to break this to Mr. Schmidt, admittedly a more accomplished man than yours truly, but in all my years of consumer consumption, I’ve never once sought out an ad or appreciated it because I felt it was “tailored just for me.” I have always been somewhat resentful of advertisements, and I suspect I’m not in the minority. Advertisers may want to believe, deep in their hearts, that what they produce is appreciated by their audience—at least on some level—probably a very schlocky one. But let’s be honest: ads are rarely anything but unwelcomed interruptions. To pretend otherwise is to engage in the grandest of self-serving delusions.

Enough of my digression, and back to my main train of thought. The aforementioned waxing rhapsodic was brought to you by Eric Schmidt courtesy of an op ed piece published earlier this month in the Wall Street Journal; a bit of irony in and of itself in that the future of news found it fit to opine on the future of news using the industry’s horse-and-buggy as a delivery model. Schmidt’s piece came shortly after news broke that Google will make it easier for publishers like the Wall Street Journal to block their material from Google News automatically, simply by adding code to their websites instead of having to contact Google via an online form. Google also recently announced that it would allow publishers to set a daily limit on the number of articles users can read for free via the Google search engine.

Content publishers, in other words, feel that they’re being short-sheeted by Google News, and in some ways they have a point. If their content is scoped and presented in a forum other than the one in which it was produced to appear, is that not akin to stealing? Content, after all, is eyeball candy, and content producers are producing it, and Google is replicating it, for the same reason: to get eyeballs on advertisements, albeit in addition to the altruistic things that content does as well, i.e., inform the reader. Sure, Google may point readers to content they may not have discovered otherwise on their own, and thereby benefits content producers by giving them a larger pool of eyeballs, but that presumes the reader is not too lazy to click through to the content source—these days not a safe bet.

The whole conundrum reminds me of the Great Napster Wars of the earlier part of this decade and the latter part of the last. Before the masses caught up with the paradigm, an intrepid internet crawler could, basically, access virtually any bit of music that someone had taken the time to digitize and make available on his or her computer . . . the exchange was free, and the quality of the music was good enough to satisfy all but the biggest of audiophiles. But soon, the sweet set up hit a critical mass; critical enough to cause a sucking chest wound in the record industry, a wound from which they have yet to recover—and perhaps never will.

The blow to the industry was cataclysmic enough for Apple to enter, stage left, and change the paradigm forever with its iTunes service. By componentizing music into a basic, bite-sized, consumer-friendly piece—the individual song—and by selling that piece at a reasonable price, iTunes changed, permanently, the way in which people buy music. No longer are consumers forced to buy the whole enchilada—we buy what we want, and no more than what we want. Unless we are dumb.

Something very, very similar to what happened to the music industry is going to happen to the news industry, and the iTunes model presents an interesting take. One can easily foresee a time where news content is provided on a subscription model, albeit one where the individual, consumable pieces of news—perhaps componentized into a “story” of a thousand words or less (like this piece)—costs far less per bite than Apple’s $0.99, because a news story is not something the average consumer goes back to time and time again, like a song. The subscription model may very well be like Napster or Rhapsody’s model: pay a set price per month and get unlimited access to a pre-defined set of content.

So Schmidt’s crystal ball, friends and neighbors, is probably precisely right. But that should scare him, and perhaps that’s why Google made concessions to content producers earlier this month. For if Schmidt’s right, and the people of the future are willing to pay subscriptions to access good content, their need for Google as a discoverer of news content goes right out the window. For, as Richard MacManus writes in a brilliant piece for ReadWriteWeb, Google’s being infiltrated on a vast scale by content farms. And that’s precisely the seaweed that will foul their screws if they allow it to continue for much longer.

By Robert Pothier