Jay Rosen attacks Google News; forgets his own ideas in the process

Image via CrunchBase

NYU Professor of Journalism Jay Rosen is a person this blogger has not met, yet.

With that, Rosen's writings on journalism and the web have been consistently consumed by this video-blogger. It's too bad that Professor Rosen, in an attempt to blindly discredit Google News and Google, forgot his own writings of the recent past.

All of this started on Twitter after this blogger found Rosen's tweet about a Salon post called "Google News gets gamed by crappy content farm."

This is not an attempt to at all defend Associated Content, nor to say that I'm a journalist as I am a blogger (to me there's a vast difference), but it is to defend Google News and tech. Frankly, some journalists spend too much time whining about the Internet, avoiding contact with techs and nerds, and precious little time learning about the Internet. I never thought Jay Rosen would be one of the people I'm talking about, or at least seem to be.

Jay tweeted this:

The one thing about content farms that I've never gotten: how can they be good for Google? They can't. http://jr.ly/zzqh
about 2 hours ago via web

To which I explained to Professor Rosen that Google revenue was (in part) based on the content posted on Google News and revenue was the ultimate end. In fact, according to Google Search VP Marissa Mayer, Google News generated over $100 million in revenue for Google in 2008, mostly from paid searches.

Rosen tweeted back that I should not treat him as if he's a moron.  Frankly, that's the last idea this blogger would ever have in association with Jay Rosen.  Rather, he's a person who seems to have forgotten recent history.

What Old Media organizations have done in recent history is sue what they don't understand.  Rather than really working to understand the Google approach and the Internet overall, or working with Google to achieve revenue gains for both parties, and to absorb both the Internet and Google as part of their business models, many old media companies have just filed lawsuits against Google or acted as "friends of the court" on the opposite side of Google.  And how's that working overall?  Not well.

Meanwhile, they have no business model, other than whining or suing, of course.

The last organization to try lawsuits as a business model was the Oakland Raiders, and that didn't do well for them either.

Tech rules.

Pointing The Way Toward The Future, Right Jay?

An April 22, 2008 post by Rosen was one that was particularly liked by this blogger. Called "Where's The Business Model for News, People?," it caused me to think that Rosen understood the need to embrace the Internet and not attack it. The blog post contains quotes from others that Jay Rosen presumably agrees with, and that I do. For example, he quotes Jeff Jarvis here:

"One problem I've had with much discussion about the future of news lately is that it's too press-centric," writes Jarvis. "It focuses on the press as if it were at the center of the world, as if it owned news, as if news depended on it, as if solving the press' problems solves news. That's not the ecosystem of news now... So pardon my simplistic drawings, but here's an attempt to begin to illustrate that new ecosystem of news and media…." With diagrams!

Also see Jarvis again: Newspapers in 2020. "What will newspapers look like in 2020? Well, what’s a newspaper?"

So, it would seem Jay Rosen agrees with Jarvis and by extension, this blogger. Instead, on Twitter, Rosen comes off on what seems for all the world to be a press-centric attack based on the Salon work, and then on this blogger.

The Salon blog post is correct about Associated Content, but wrong about Google News, as is Jay Rosen. For every example of a content farm based on Google Trends, there are examples of new media, bloggers, and mainstream media organizations that use Google News and Google Trends to produce effective work. Here, I praise the Los Angeles Times, who's "game" in this area has improved dramatically.

Unfortunately, The LA Times is more often than not the only one of its kind that seems to get it.

Tech is the answer, not whining. As I said to Rosen on Twitter, I bet he couldn't take a blank sheet of paper and write the code for a web page, let alone a website. I can.

The day that journalists can do that, is the time we will see imaginative approaches to the presentation and monetization of media, and the end of whining.