Publishers should give Google a chance as it tries to make peace

Google’s Digital News Initiative in Europe is a good news story in an otherwise bad news month for them. As a founder partner, we recognise this initiative will be seen as a hand-out to some, but we sense there is something quite fundamental to play for.

Clearly, this initiative looks like old fashioned public relations tailored for the old continent. It is Europe only … for now. Most of the elements of the initiative – funding for innovation, digital training for journalists – have been talked about before and these will be more useful to some than others.

But while the headlines may focus on the €150m (£107m) innovation fund – building on the smaller France fund of 2013 – the real story could be the commitment of Google’s engineering and product team to look again at traffic, engagement and revenue for news.

The charge sheet laid before Google in Brussels earlier this month is just the latest in a series of high-profile confrontations between Google and European publishers. This initiative won’t solve those concerns or head off the commission’s action, nor should it.

There are clearly legitimate questions about dominance that Google will need to answer.

But many in Silicon Valley believe this all stems from an unreconstructed newspaper industry fighting to protect an old business model. There may be an element of truth in that. Let’s be clear, Google’s evolution has presented professional news and journalism organisations with significant existential and commercial threats. The loss of distribution might for newspapers and TV companies is matched by a loss of automatic authority: our industry no longer has a monopoly on how and where citizens access news.

Yet most publishers I know are excited by the new potential of the digital world. For us at the Guardian, we can reach audiences at a scale unimaginable just a few years ago. At its peak, the Guardian shipped 55,000 physical copies of the Guardian to readers outside of the UK. Today we reach 113 million unique browsers every month. An open web allows us to reach large audiences who can be of potentially significant commercial value and more importantly, can participate in the journalism itself to give society a better account of the truth.

Our challenge is that the economics do not yet stack up and no publisher has yet cracked a successful digital business model for original, quality and trusted journalism.

There are plenty of start-ups building mass audiences using algorithmic techniques with almost no new investment in content. Then there are those of us who believe there is still a need for significant and professional journalists and a need for robust and resilient journalism institutions with the resources it takes to challenge the most powerful in society: from large multinational corporations to governments and security establishments.

The question is: does Google believe this too? The reason why the Guardian and seven other European publishers have worked together to launch this initiative is a belief that it is in Google’s self-interest to do something critical: use its power to support a vibrant and sustainable ecosystem for news and journalism.

The irony is that Google certainly used to believe this too. Google wants to organise the world’s information and presumably this means more than just creating the best yellow pages the web can be. Eric Schmidt has acknowledged what he calls Google’s “moral responsibility” to help news survive, for without it, democracy would suffer. But more prosaically, he has stated that Google needs content companies like journalism organisations to thrive for their business model to work. Publishers – whether famous newspapers, large broadcasters or new digital journalism upstarts – are part of the information supply chain that powers Google’s success and evolution into the world’s biggest advertising platform.

So can today’s initiative be a genuine partnership between Google and journalism, and thereby a tide to lift all boats? This would require Google’s leadership to see both mission and method here and to realise the real benefits for users. It would see them deploy their best engineering brains to want to fix the problem. It would result in fresh thinking within the product and engineering organisation at Google around those drivers of successful content online: adaptation for mobile platforms, excellence in online video, intelligent use of data with respect for privacy, differentiation between original content and content “gamed” for Google, and new paths to monetisation and thus sustainability of journalism. And it would see this thinking and this partnership spread globally.

In short, it would mean more work in Mountain View than Brussels.

For many publishers, it often feels like working with Google is an unfair fight. But maybe it doesn’t need to be a fight. And maybe it doesn’t need to be a zero-sum game.

We’re willing to test that hypothesis for a little while to see if we can make the digital age a golden age for journalism. It will be fascinating to see if Google wants this too.

Tony Danker is international director at the Guardian

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