The LA Times ran an opinion piece on April 27 wondering what Google and Yahoo will do next in their news and information play. It wondered, tongue in cheek, how long it would before we saw the Google Street Journal. It’s good to see newspapers wondering about their future and how the more cashed up search engines which have become such successful competitors will deal with the more traditional media companies.
It’s only a matter of time before a Yahoo or a Google decides to buy an old media company in order to differentiate itself by offering high-quality, proprietary news. Or a company like Amazon could buy a prestigious newspaper publisher and reinvent itself as a portal, leapfrogging over those that treat news updates as a commodity.
Business schools would tell us that such takeovers are to be expected. At the Board table it will be buy buy buy. Why? Because they have the cash and will see mastheads as valuable additions o their already respected brands.
Newspapers have the newsgathering and analysis expertise. Google buying a news organisation would enable them to take those assets and the masthead and release the content from the confines of the physical product as we know it today.
Refer to my posting a week ago on E-Paper. Google in the direct news publishing business and the commercialisation of E-Paper … now that’s a giant leap forward. But not so far forward from where we are today.
News stories want to be set free from the restrictions of newspapers where the needs of advertisers come first.
Amid the flurry of cheque writing for such take-overs there will continue to be plenty of small players focusing on news from their backyard in the belief that an era of local focus in the news and information business has started.