The week we couldn’t find Google News

The Weekly Wrap: February 23, 2024

The week we couldn’t find Google News

Sarah on Wednesday: “Where is the Google News filter?” Us: “Haha what” [continues talking about divorce on Slack] Sarah: [posts succession of screenshots] “Where is the ‘news’ filter?”

Obviously it doesn’t make sense that Google News would disappear, we use that all the time, must be a bug or some crazy Sarah tech issue surely! Except then she asked Google and guess what, they are indeed “testing different ways to show filters on Search” and so some are sporadically disappearing. Is the News filter especially disappearing? Unclear — for someone the shopping filter was also gone — but, I don’t know, in the week where, for instance, now-owned-by-a-private-equity-company Vice said it’s laying off hundreds and “will no longer publish content on Vice.com” because “it is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously” (on a website?) you’d forgive people for being a little alarmed.

Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Journalism at Columbia, has a theory that I asked her to elaborate on a little:

Google Discover is I think the stealth replacement for Google News and traffic patterns absolutely reflect that (10x more through Discover) …which is a shame because Discover is an absolutely awful product (imo) https://t.co/HDCo2sWdHK

— emily bell (@emilybell) February 23, 2024

Well I think it’s not a coincidence that the news tab is being messed around with at a time Discover is ascendant for traffic. It’s not at all a substitute but my worry is that at Google internally its all seen as ‘news traffic’

— emily bell (@emilybell) February 23, 2024

Recommended for me in Discover right now: “The hollowing out of Vice and BuzzFeed marks the end of the digital media revolution,” Wirecutter office chair reviews (speaking of product reviews), “What is the magnesum trend about?”, and a week-old article on how they did that with Paul Giamatti’s eye in The Holdovers; that eye article is from The AV Club, a site also now owned by a private equity firm.

— Laura Hazard Owen

From the week

Google tests removing the News tab from search results

The News filter disappearing from Google search results for some users this week won’t help publishers sleep any easier. By Sarah Scire.

Wealthier, urban Americans have access to more local news

But roughly half of U.S. counties have only one news outlet or less. By Sarah Stonbely.

A new study looks at the positive things that can happen when journalism and comedy intersect

“When I asked people ‘Are you journalists?’ they would say no. But if I asked them ‘Is what is what you do journalistic?’ they say yes, of course.” By Hanaa' Tameez.

“We’ve really worked hard not to ever have a pivot at The New York Times”: A.G. Sulzberger on AI, local news, and that Trump bump

“Never get comfortable; always assume that the world is conspiring to take down the industry and that we will have to move heaven and earth to overcome those forces to blaze a path forward for quality journalism.” By Joshua Benton.

Out of the rabbit hole? New research shows people can change their minds about conspiracy theories

A study of 498 Australians and New Zealanders finds “no evidence that individual beliefs in conspiracy theories increased on average over time.” By Matt Williams, John Kerr and Mathew Marques.

Most big legacy news publishers across 10 countries are blocking OpenAI’s crawlers, report finds

Press Forward adds 11 new local chapters

Six weeks after abrupt Houston Landing firings, staffers unionize

Google promotes sketchy product “reviews” from big publishers at the expense of small indie sites, a small indie site argues

Highlights from elsewhere

Defector / Chris Thompson

Vice was a good website. It was killed by private equity owners and self-dealing leaders. →

“The band of worthless but extravagantly overcompensated executives who seized the Vice ship from its previous regime of worthless but extravagantly overcompensated executives have decided that the business’s new direction will be in content licensing and re-emphasized social media channels, and that’s that.”

Washington Post / Elahe Izadi and Will Sommer

NPR station WAMU shuts down local news site DCist and will lay off reporters →

“Station general manager Erika Pulley-Hayes made the announcement to staffers during a roughly 10-minute meeting — during which no questions were taken — that the shift was necessary as part of a new content strategy that was developed over the last year, to focus more on audio.”

The New York Times / Sapna Maheshwari and Mike Isaac

Instagram’s uneasy rise as a news site →

“My friends who are millennial moms are busy — they have jobs, they have kids, they have to put food on the table,” said Emily Amick, a lawyer and Instagram influencer who considers herself an “at-large opinion editor” on the platform. “They don’t have tons of extra time to consume news, and they were already on Instagram. So this is the way for them to be able to consume news through a modality they’re already using.”

Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt

Germany’s Bild proves paywalls can work for tabloids as it hits 700,000 milestone →

“Bildplus, which launched in June 2013, hit 700,000 digital subscribers in late 2023 and is now up to 707,208. This makes it the biggest subscriber base in the German-speaking news market and one of the most popular paywalled news websites in the world.”

Wired / Lauren Goode

Crying in Apple Vision Pro is no laughing matter →

“I never really expected to cry a hundred different ways, but I’d hoped to feel connected in just as many. This is what mixed-reality headset makers promise, along with the assurance that wearers will be ‘transported.’ Instead, I felt so heavily the weight of aloneness — and the headset — that it distracted from the stories that had been constructed in front of me.”

Ars Technica / Timothy B. Lee and James Grimmelmann

Why The New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI →

“AI companies are on shakier legal ground than Google was in its book search case. And the courts don’t always side with technology companies in cases where companies make copies to build their systems. The story of MP3.com illustrates the kind of legal peril AI companies could face in the coming years.”

Slate Magazine / Dan Kois

She was the most feared woman in publishing. What happened? →

“A Times reporter elevated to the critic’s chair at 28, she often seemed to approach the job of book reviewing as a reportorial one: She took great notes, she assembled them smartly, and she moved on to the next story. [Michiko] Kakutani did seem to take seriously the reviewer’s role as consumer guide. ‘My job as a critic was to give honest evaluations of new books and to try to explain why I thought they were worth reading—or not,’ she said after she left the paper.”

Rest of World / Russell Brandom

Tech platforms are suffocating opposition media in Russia →

“…outlets like The Insider are already facing intense censorship from within Russia. The Insider’s website is blocked in Russia, and only accessible through a VPN. On YouTube, The Insider’s videos are swarmed by trolls sympathetic to Putin, who keep the videos out of recommendations by mass-reporting them. Online platforms are among the few ways to get around that censorship — but they’ve shown little interest in helping journalists like Dobrokhotov reach his audience.”