Google AMP: every other Nail In Coffin Of Journalism?

through , Featured Contributor, (February 26, 2016)

Google’s Accelerated mobile Pages (AMP) officially launched this week. AMP helps information stories load fast in cellular Google search (putting them on the prime of outcomes given that web page load is a chief consider pure search results). while tightening the guidelines for content material on AMP pages will, it is hoped, get rid of crappy ads that flip off customers, others see AMP as “a central a part of Google’s maniacal mission to clean up the cellular net and raise search revenue on cell.”

In a story about AMP, probably the most collaborating media company professionals said: “would it be higher to have three pics that are aspect with the aid of facet?” (versus one interactive photograph that may weigh down a web page and gradual its load.) “you need to take into consideration this with every story you create.”

no longer goodbye in the past, probably the most significant selections about how to attract a reader to a story had been the headline and the place of the story in the newspaper or magazine. This was largely driven with the aid of the “intestine emotions” of top editors, and minimal remarks like snail mail letters to the editor. beyond newsstand gross sales — which have been referendums on the quilt images — and a few occasional focal point groups, editors had now not a clue who used to be studying what. Their easiest measure of vindication got here when other news organization picked up their tales.

The ad side did a fair quantity of research about what readers liked and did not about publications, however introduced the findings to the editors on bended knees and with bowed heads, hands uplifted — with the loudly exclaimed caveat: “we might not pretend to inform you learn how to alternate anything else!”

Now editors have to thrill not readers, but distribution channels from social media to information aggregators, from search to advice engines. And all of this task is pushed by means of the simplistic perception that if anyone clicks on a narrative, or socializes it, they like it.

considering the fact that i’m the center of The Universe, it’s value noting that I click on rankings of stories that I hate or assume are written by cretins, because 1) i’m a news junkie and a couple of) it is a component of my job and three) i’ve a lifelong pastime in what has took place to journalism in this usa.

With so many digital publications available in the market (most of them crap, however worth a read every now and again), discovery is more difficult than ever. proper, there are many apps or desktop packages that promise to deliver precisely the news i need from virtually anywhere around the globe, but I in finding most of them very troublesome to fine-tune for most reliable results on account that my pursuits are far and wide the map.

So with the wheat comes a good quantity of chaff. I pay close consideration to the tales that my fb or Twitter pals level to (smartly, at least the headlines) — particularly Mookie Tenembaum, who, i am certain, is online 23 hours a day gobbling up information and POVs from all over the world.

So while I acknowledge the position that the Googles and the Facebooks and the (insert your favorite) play in serving to us to find tales to learn, I continue to be involved that editors have forgotten that their target market is readers, not desktop-realized algorithms. 

And i would argue that pandering to the bottom fashionable denominator so as to improve clicks will in some way hurt more than assist.  Even the “gut-guided” editors of yesteryear knew that international affairs and economics have been a ways less neatly-learn than the police blotter and superstar gossip, but they understood that such stories have been necessary for an knowledgeable public.

The digital era has put enormous drive on the craft and economics of journalism. Let’s hope that having to jot down and edit to the factors of distribution channels — especially in our cellular world — just isn’t yet some other nail in the coffin.

 

MediaPost.com: Search advertising and marketing day-to-day

(19)