Google cut dozens of jobs in its news division this week, CNBC has learned, downsizing at a particularly sensitive time for online platforms and publishers.
An estimated 40 to 45 workers in Google News have lost their jobs, according to an Alphabet Workers Union spokesperson, who didn’t know the exact number.A Google spokesperson confirmed the cuts but didn’t provide a number, and said there are still hundreds of people working on the news product.
I’m no expert in personnel management and human resources, but with the state of the world such as it is, it seems like an incredibly inopportune time to decimate your news department, especially when you’re a tech company, who already have an absolutely abysmal track record when it comes to dealing with news and misinformation.
Ah,
Just last week we talked about Discover, and now they lay off my previous team at News.
News was a “passion project” for Google, and served users for about two decades without asking for money, or serving ads. (Yes, that has changed recently. And, no, in-app publisher subscriptions do not count).
Best of luck to all those who are affected, and I hope they will be able to find even better positions soon.
Some governments around the world thought it would be a good idea to impose a “link tax” (basically making Google pay to link to news sites). That way, the politicians thought, big bad Google gets to pay money to those poor little news sites feeling the competition from blogs (because they don’t provide any meaningful benefits compared to blogs, because they don’t run original stories anymore). Win!
Of course, nobody asked Google if they wanted to do that, so, guess what happens next: Google News gets to be slowly shut down, while Youtube gets an investment in its “authoritative news” channel which links internally to YouTube videos and doesn’t have to pay the link tax:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/18/23922070/youtube-news-immersive-watch-page-experience-shortform
kurkosdr,
It is actually worse than that.
News is bringing measurable increase to website traffic. How do we know? In some instances like France, Google shut down News due to these laws (or used only publishers who did not ask for this double dipping). And then they quickly reversed the decisions at the request of the very same publishers.
But over time these rules become even more elaborate, and pulling out from each country one by one is really tiring.
Most publishers understand the value the service being to them. Especially when it is free.
sukru,
It’s only “free” in one sense, but google have created great harm to professional news sources by taking the advertising market for themselves. They squeezed those advertisers for trillions, advertising dollars that would have gone elsewhere. This is good in the sense that it pays for the services google provides (at the expense of other local businesses who cannot compete with “free”, but that’s a different topic). The problem for journalism was that google didn’t create “new” wealth, their growth took advertising dollars away from salaried journalists and news departments by placing ads on google’s websites instead of the news websites. And because Google does not have to pay the salaries of journalists/field reporters/etc, they can easily undercut news outlets on the price of ads.
I know that this is uncomfortable for google supporters, but google have a large hand in the financial crisis affecting journalists, local independent news, magazines, etc. I don’t think the consequences of this are over. An indirect consequence of kicking out their financial support, it has encouraged the unintentional rise of much cheaper formats that promote opinion pieces instead, which may be fracturing society. While I don’t think this was ever intended by google, they are intertwined with the cause and effect.
Alfman,
sukru,
What is the marketshare breakdown between google news versus google search? I only use the later and it does have lots of ads.
I’d put youtube red in the same category, it didn’t really catch on.
I could be out of touch, but I get the feeling google news is very small compared to google’s main advertising properties.
Alfman,
I don’t think this is about the marketshare, but more about them being separate products. I can’t go into how much Search and News are integrated (of course there is some integration), they are (were?) pretty much run separately.
News is one of the new Google products that are not revolving about revenue, but rather a mission of a service. Some similar ones would be Book Search, Scholar, Patents, and others.
(This used to include gChat later Hangouts, Plus later Currents, googl.gl link shortener, Lists, Cloud Print, Code, Code Jam, Picasa, … ah… I think I am listing the infamous Google Graveyard 🙂 )
s/new/few/g
sukru,
Well, marketshare clearly determines how much impact they have. Many users don’t use URLs at all, everything goes to google first. That has a big impact. Google news is probably not even a sliver of that.
I concede this is my speculation, but a lot of services start out as loss leaders and to the extent that google news became very popular and entrenched with the masses, I suspect google executives would want to advertise there too. You don’t think so? “More billions for us, yes please”.
Thom: There’s an old-fashioned term we used to use in the ’00s which I am sure you know – FUD – Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. I don’t hear it much these days. It seemed to be directed mostly towards Steve Ballmer-era Microsoft by the open source community and Apple fans, but it strikes me that it applies handsomely in many of the mis/dis-information and culture wars today.
Without intending to stand as the defense for Google, the MSNBC article you referenced seems to me to be lacking in fact and is padded out with hearsay and guesswork: An estimated 40-50 workers, according to a union spokesperson who didn’t know the number; a verbose, corporatese statement from a Google spokesperson who didn’t provide the number; five paragraphs not related to the clickbait headline, but ‘factlets’ about the wider regulatory landscape facing Google/YouTube, X and Meta – more than 1/3 of the article.
We are not told what 40-50 workers (if accurate) represents as a proportion of the Google News team. At the very end of the article, we are provided with a link to a LinkedIn post by a well-meaning colleague who suggest that “the layoff spans a handful of functions like engineering, product management, and program management”. I am too ignorant to know how much these functions might affect moderation and fact-checking, however much Google already lacks them.
The horse has long ago bolted through the stable door of traditional edited news, but if editors at sites like MSNBC did a better job of editing their output and presenting facts we can believe and make sound judgements about, perhaps there would be a tiny chance that we could at least get a head-collar back on that pony, if never get back into the stable.
Correction: CNBC (self-editing so poor)