How to Save the News
Plummeting newspaper circulation, disappearing classified ads, “unbundling” of content—the list of what’s killing journalism is long. But high on that list, many would say, is Google, the biggest unbundler of them all. Now, having helped break the news business, the company wants to fix it—for commercial as well as civic reasons: if news organizations stop producing great journalism, says one Google executive, the search engine will no longer have interesting content to link to. So some of the smartest minds at the company are thinking about this, and working with publishers, and peering ahead to see what the future of journalism looks like. Guess what? It’s bright.
Photos by Robyn Twomey/Redux (Above: Hal Varian, Google's chief economist)
Also see:
Slideshow: "A Google-Eye View of the Newspaper Business"
A presentation by the company’s chief economist, Hal Varian
Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects.
Of course this overstates Google’s power to destroy, or create. The company’s chief economist, Hal Varian, likes to point out that perhaps the most important measure of the newspaper industry’s viability—the number of subscriptions per household—has headed straight down, not just since Google’s founding in the late 1990s but ever since World War II. In 1947, each 100 U.S. households bought an average of about 140 newspapers daily. Now they buy fewer than 50, and the number has fallen nonstop through those years. If Google had never been invented, changes in commuting patterns, the coming of 24-hour TV news and online information sites that make a newspaper’s information stale before it appears, the general busyness of life, and many other factors would have created major problems for newspapers. Moreover, “Google” is shorthand for an array of other Internet-based pressures on the news business, notably the draining of classified ads to the likes of Craigslist and eBay. On the other side of the balance, Google’s efforts to shore up news organizations are extensive and have recently become intense but are not guaranteed to succeed.
Google Readies Its E-Book Plan, Bringing in a New Sales Approach
By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO And JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG
Google Inc. plans to begin selling digital books in late June or July, a company official said Tuesday, throwing the search giant into a battle that already involves Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Barnes & Noble Inc.
Google has been discussing its vision for distributing books online for several years and for months has been evangelizing about its new service, called Google Editions. The company is hoping to distinguish Google Editions in the marketplace by allowing users to access books from a broad range of websites using an array of devices, unlike rivals that are focused on proprietary devices and software.
Chris Palma, Google's manager for strategic-partner development, announced the timetable for Google's plans on Tuesday at a publishing- industry panel in New York.
Apple to Shut Down Lala.com
Apple Inc. said it was shutting down its Lala.com online music service at the end of May, a move prompting speculation the iPhone maker might soon launch a new Web-based version of its iTunes music store.
Lala, which Apple bought in December for an undisclosed price, lets users stream any track from its 8 million-song Internet-based catalogue once for free, and it also sold unlimited streams for 10 cents a track. Members could also purchase MP3 downloads starting at 79 cents.
A message on Lala's home page says the service will no longer accept new users and will shut down May 31. Customers who have paid to stream music will be refunded with iTunes credits. Apple spokesman Jason Roth declined to comment on the company's plans after it shuts down Lala.
Calling Almost Everyone’s Tune
By DAVID SEGAL
“It’s tough to handle this fortune and fame.
Everybody’s so different; I haven’t changed.”
— Joe Walsh, “Life’s Been Good”
LOS ANGELES
FOR a man who sits atop one of the most feared corporations in the music business, Irving Azoff seems surprisingly proud of his middle finger. Images of it, raised high and defiant, are hard to avoid in his home, a 12,000-square-foot mansion in one of the richest neighborhoods in this city.
There he is, the chairman of the newly merged Ticketmaster and Live Nation, staring from behind his digit of choice in a photograph on his stationery. And there he is again, grinning from the same vantage point in an image on a sweatshirt that he wears one afternoon when he offers a tour of his estate.
Somehow, when deployed by Mr. Azoff, this obscene gesture seems less a profanity than a very succinct statement of personal philosophy. At roughly 5-foot-3 and at the age of 62 — imagine an accountant who used to be a jockey — he has a teenager’s sense of humor and a rascally, triumphant style that has been the bane of his enemies and the delight of his allies for four decades.
“He who dies with the most toys wins,” read the front of a T-shirt that he once had made for employees of his artist management firm, which has handled acts like the Eagles, Steely Dan, and the Go-Gos. The back of the shirt read, “Irving wins!”
He has won often over the years, but his biggest victory might well have come on Jan. 25. That day, the Justice Department blessed a merger between Ticketmaster, the ticketing giant that Mr. Azoff has led since 2008, and Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promotion company.