Google's atomic answer to online news

SMH

FRENEMY: Google's Marissa Mayer.

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As the editors and publishers of America's mainstream press reach for their pitchforks in anticipation of a showdown with Google, the smiling face of their nemesis is arguing that they're part of the solution, not the problem.

Marissa Mayer, the workaholic vice-president of search product and user experience at Google, is explaining what she calls the "atomic unit of consumption" and what happens to it during periods of disruption caused by emerging new media.

Consider how Apple's iTunes online music service extinguished the record album and replaced it with the single track download. Or how Google-owned YouTube condensed the hour-long TV show into the three-minute clip.

The same, she says in an interview at Google's Californian headquarters, is happening to the press: the internet has atomised that bundle of news, information and crosswords known as a newspaper into its constituent parts.

"I think it's clear that the internet has challenged a lot of notions on how people want to consume news and I think that's in the nature of the media, I don't think that's specific to Google," she says.

Ms Mayer, who joined Google in 1999 and is the company's highest-ranking female employee, was talking just after a group of top US newspaper executives met in Chicago to discuss the future of news gathering.

The meeting took place against a backdrop of collapsing circulation and shrinking ad revenues. Already this year several big city papers have closed, others have gone online only and hundreds of employees have lost their jobs.

A paper prepared by the American Press Institute was presented at the meeting detailing a plan to better protect the newspapers' online content from unfair use by aggregators and bottom-feeders and to reclaim a bigger cut of the revenues from that content.

Part of the plan involved putting online content behind a pay wall - a plan championed by the News Corporation chairman, Rupert Murdoch, who had also just appeared on Fox Business News declaring the days of free news online to be over.

Google is blamed in the API report for having caused that atomisation of content and Ms Mayer is identified as a "frenemy" (part friend, part enemy).

Google, Ms Mayer says, is good for newspapers and offers statistical proof of that friendship: traffic referral of more than 1 billion clicks a month to newspaper websites and a payout to publishers last year of more than US$5 billion for hosting Google advertising.

She goes on to dispense some critical-sounding advice, implying that the mainstream media does not understand online and that newspapers are partly to blame for their own predicament.

"The approach, 'Let's just take whatever appeared in the print paper and put it on a web page' doesn't work," she says.

She points out how sites such as YouTube and the online retailer Amazon.com construct their content so that there is always more to buy or more to watch. "I can go to various newspapers and when you scroll down to the bottom, what do you do next?

"There were related stories and related videos but those were up on the top. So now the most committed user - the one that reads through the entire piece - is now looking at the bottom of the page with nothing to do."

Ms Mayer says linking to more information, engaging readers in dialogue and making the content more interactive are part of the "web fundamentals" that could be used to "end up with a product that will look different than news online does today".

Stephen Hutcheon attended the Google I/O developers' conference in San Francisco as a guest of Google. The interview with Marissa Mayer stemmed from a request made by the reporter.

Read an edited transcript of the interview:
Q&A with Google's Marissa Mayer

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