Google partners to fund new local media sites

First, Google, a surveillance machine, kills journalism by monopolizing the ad business. And now it pretends to support journalism through its handouts. Nice society we are building, folks.

The main problem is that this just does not scale. Facebook and Google have damaged the business model of local media all over the world – now how can they fix that by reintroducing local media to a few towns below 500 thousand people? If they really want to undo the damage, a systemic change is needed, otherwise it’s just feel good PR.

(I’m from a former communist country and this almost feels like the collectivization: prevent people from running their own businesses and then be so kind as to let them work for the central government. Spoiler: it did not work.)

Well, it's like saying Autos killed Horse and Buggies, and auto manufacturers contributing to horse farms means they are bad people.

How likely was it that local news was going to survive the digital transition as is, when suddenly, people who never ventured more than 25 miles from where they are born, and mostly obtained news by paper delivery or local TV, can suddenly access the sum total of human knowledge and any news all over the world?

Suddenly your local paper, which had "default" access set almost like a default app on an OS, is no longer the default because the barrier to accessing everything else is way lower.

The writing was on the wall, in the same way that streaming killed optical media and optical media killed LPs. Or in the same way that e-commerce is killing retail once logistics gets cheap enough to make delivery cheaper than buying in store.

This was going to happen inevitably.

can't the same be said about horse drawn carriage companies? ford model t came in and damaged their business model.

Or not so feel good. Rolling with your own experience is the idea to genuinely support local media, or is it to introduce Pravda and Izvestiya? Google has clear political motivations and has been engaged in an increasingly large number of dubious actions. When this organization now wants to start throwing its weight directly behind news, it's not something I would generally see in a positive light.

For example Google has partnered with the New America Foundation which is a think tank that provides input on a wide range of issues through a variety of different groups. When the head of their Open Markets group endorsed and encouraged further government action against monopolistic behavior, following Google's being fined $2.7billion in Europe, they terminated the groups leader and closed the entire division. Google, now having plausible deniability since they were separated from the entity again through a 'partner' - as they now plan to do with the media, claimed they had nothing to do with it. [1]

This in many ways makes the "independent" partnerships even more disconcerting. It preemptively sets the stage for plausible deniability, while also working to distance themselves from a publication - even though there's every reason to doubt that distance actually exists in practice.

[1] - https://theintercept.com/2017/08/30/google-funded-think-tank...