Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a press conference in Cambridge, MA yesterday, and Nieman Lab’s Zach Seward was on-hand to record the results.
On Google’s definition of ‘bloggers’:
…a blog that’s associated with a major, legitimate organization — of which, I think, the majority, if not everyone, in the room is associated with — would be, I think, treated differently than an individual blogger who’s using his or her right of free expression to say whatever he thinks. So the presence of an editor, as an example. You know, an editor that’s not your mom.
On whether Google has aspirations to build a customized flow of aggregated information–what VP Marissa Mayer has termed the “hyperpersonalized news stream”:
We have about ten news stream ideas, of which hyperpersonalization is one. And, again, I’d rather not talk about specific products or even prioritize them, but I would make the following observation: In five or ten years, what will the primary news reader look like?
Well, that person will be probably on a tablet or a mobile phone, probably the majority of the reading will presumably be online not offline, just because of the scale of it. It’ll be highly personalized, right? So you’ll know who the person is. There’ll be a lot of integration of media — so video, voice, what have you. It’ll be advertising-supported and subscription-supported, so you’ll probably have a mixture. Think of the Kindle as an example. The Kindle is a proto of what this thing could look like. People will carry these things around.
So if you start thinking about that, it becomes pretty obvious what the products need to be: more personalized, much deeper, capable of deeper navigation into a subject. Also, show me the differential. Since you know what you told me yesterday, just tell me what changed today. Don’t repeat everything.
On Google’s “moral responsibility” to aid news organizations (an idea Schmidt discussed last month):
We have a responsibility. We have not yet figured out how to exercise that responsibility…We’re looking for new ideas. It’s a hard problem because, as everybody knows, printed circulation has declined, and the online use of newspapers has exploded positively. So you’ve got a bridge problem between one and the other, and we want to help. We really do.
Full quotes at Nieman Lab.
Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.