Google's Plan To Save the News Through Reinvention 83
eldavojohn writes "It's no secret that Google doesn't create content, but rather helps people find it. And Google News is no different. So what does the company plan to do about complaints from the news industry that profits are dropping drastically? In a lengthy and comprehensive article, The Atlantic diagnoses the problem and looks at Google's plan to 'save' the symbiotic organism it is attached to, which older generations have traditionally branded 'the news.' The answer, of course, hinges on moving news from dead tree print to the information age via Google's many projects: Living Stories, Fast Flip, and YouTube Direct. But Google is also exploring the more traditional options of displaying ads and designing a paywall so users can easily migrate back to subscriptions like the newspapers of yore. You may also recall that last week the Internet was abuzz with the idiocy of suggestions the FTC had aggregated from inside the industry. Ars brings mention of other proposed plans, both good and bad, from the FTC's report on ideas that newspaper companies are kicking around."
Re:Newspapers need to team up with someone else... (Score:4, Informative)
Google Earth is about the most innovative I can think of
Google Earth wasn't new technology either; it's just a more webified version of the old Terraserver [wikipedia.org] project at Microsoft, which had been operating for close to 8 years before Google launched Google Earth.
Re:Newspapers need to team up with someone else... (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I do believe Google Maps pretty well sparked the Web 2.0 trend, and was pretty loudly revered by all who saw it when it first came out.
Google image search was a rather fundamental change, and GIS has become as much of a verb as Google. Others have since copied it, but before GIS, searching for images was vastly more painful.
I'd suppose their back-end technology is pretty good as well. Containerized data centers, et al.