NYT’s Keller Warns On ‘Unreliable’ News From Google, Others
By Dianne See Morrison - Sat 01 Dec 2007 03:10 PM PST
From our sister site paidContent:UK: New York Times (NYSE: NYT) executive editor Bill Keller has warned the news business is falling victim to the “media tsunami” of the internet world - and taken a swipe at Google. Speaking in London at a memorial lecture for late columnist Hugo Young, he condemned the “unreliable” information readers are assaulted by through a blitz of blogs, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News, RSS feeds, social networks and video sharing sites.
He urged the audience of journalists to keep faith in the newsgathering cornerstone of accuracy over speed, The Guardian reports, adding: “Google News and Wikipedia don’t have bureaus in Baghdad, or anywhere else. With a few exceptions, they do not - in the cold terminology of the 21st century media business - ‘create content’. Wikipedia and Google aggregate information from, well, from us. From the Times, from the Guardian, and from a lot of less dependable sources.”
If that sounded like a contradictory argument, then, as Keller himself noted, The Times site publishes more than 30 of its own blogs and aggregates material from several others to its own pages. Digital income from the paper, which owns Blogrunner, rose to 10.6 of overall revenue and helped improve the bottom line in Q3.
Keller conceded blogs “can swarm around a subject and turn up fascinating tidbits, they allow you to follow a story as it unfolds”. And he accepted that there are even bloggers who file “enlightening” first-hand reports from places such as Iraq, but: “Most of the blog world does not even attempt to report. It recycles. It riffs on the news. That’s not bad. It’s just not enough. Not nearly enough.”
Staci adds: Keller also called out his “friend Jeff Jarvis” in, well, a condescending manner that misrepresented Jeff’s position, saying he “refers to news bloggers as ‘citizen journalists,’ which has a sweet, idealistic ring to it. Jeff, like many of the most ardent true believers in the blog revolution, suggests that the mainstream media can be largely replaced by a self-regulating democracy of voices, the wisdom of the crowd.”
Be sure to read Jeff’s response.
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