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Editor’s note: The actual quote was “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The full presentation is available here: http://sites.google.com/site/io/the-worlds-information-in-context

“Our mission is to make information available and make it useful.” — Michael T. Jones, Chief Technology Advocate, Google

When Michael Jones uttered that line at the recent Google I/O conference, I about fell over. Waitaminute, I thought, isn’t that the roll of the newspaper? I mean, if Google’s mission is to make information available and make it useful, how is that any different from the traditional newspaper mission?

Capital “J” Journalism

Like Google, the basic newspaper mission is to make information available and make it useful too, but there’s a pretty fundamental difference in approaches. Google’s take on making information useful is a technical one, you know by making a really damn good search engine or making a wicked cool mapping engine that anyone can use or by publishing various web API’s that do data visualizations or… whatever. Basically, Google addresses the problem of “useful information” with a computer. That works, clearly, but only so far.

Newspapers on the other hand take a human approach. They have these people called “Journalists” who’s job it is to explain why the news matters. They use knowledge, intuition and experience to — in theory anyway — get that whole “useful information” bit right. In short, newspapers distill raw news and information into just the “useful” bits and that roll is by and large pretty much the domain of a human, and a skilled one at that. We call it Journalism and it works, clearly, but just like the Google approach, only so far.

Best of both worlds

Ah, but its at the newspaper website where the situation is different. This is where a newspaper can one up behemoths like Google by having their cake and eating it too. On its website a newspaper can, like Google, throw computers at the problem of “making information useful” and at the same time continue to print the news stories that highlight what is (or should be) really important to the reader.

Newspapers can map crime locations along side stories on the impact of those crimes. They can post databases of State employee salaries along with stories about how much public-sector managers are getting paid. The list goes on and on. At Google I/O they even did a bit on the fire maps of last year’s fires, but they didn’t mention those maps accompanied reporting by real people.

Clearly newspapers have the edge. Clearly newspapers can deliver a superior product by combining technology solutions (databases, maps, rapid updates) with good, old-fashioned Journalism.

Except, they don’t.

All the news that fits, we’ll print

Think about it, if news websites — and specifically newspaper websites — are this pinnacle of “making information available and useful,” able to combine both technology and traditional Journalism into this ultimate news and information powerhouse, then it begs the question: what is the newspaper still good for? In this Googleized world is the paper not simply a tired, eco-unfriendly, resource sucking, 50 inch wide inferior snapshot of the website that is perennially 12-18 hours old?

Well… pretty much, yeah.

Except for one thing: make no doubt about it, newspapers make a crapload of money. Besides being the excellent vehicles for that “distilled” news they were essentially designed for, they make superior advertising vehicles. That’s right, advertising vehicles. When have you ever heard anyone say, “I only go the the website for the ads.”? Yes, display advertising and coupons still rule. Even the digerati, who would never admit to reading a newspaper offline, go hunting for that Fry’s ad every Friday.

Simply put, even in these less than comfortable times for newspapers, the revenue generated by a newspaper’s print product is huge when compared to the web product, though by any rational measure print is the inferior news delivery medium.

So we’re at an impasse, how do we reconcile the superior advertising platform that a newspaper is with the superior news and information provider that a newspaper website can be?

Web first

Until recently I’ve been a fan of centralized publishing. That is, the notion that once a story has been cleared through the editing cycle you “publish” it to a central database and only then do you decide the medium that it goes to — web or print or both (or radio or TV or iPhones etc). This grand approach eliminates a lot of the bottlenecks associated with the more prevalent “print page scraping” model that a lot of newspaper web operations still operate under, but in the end it still suffers because of one false assumption, it assumes that web and print are equals.

And this is my point: they’re not.

So maybe the time has come for a radical re-thinking. Maybe it’s time to think web first and publish the newspaper from the work done to fill the web site instead of the other way around. By doing so you re-focus your newsroom to think of the big news picture. Databases, maps, widgets, multimedia, the whole shebang become the standard fair and the paper, that ultimate niche product, is built as a secondary product using just the “traditional” news stories from the web site that work so well in print.

It’s crazy I know, it may even be offensive, but why not? Then you could make information more available and more useful than ever before and keep those all mighty dollars flowing at the same time.

Time is running out

Recently Steve Balmer of Microsoft fame gave newspapers 10 years. He said all news delivery would be delivered over a network in ten years. I tend to agree.

And you know what? It’s not gonna happen overnight, in fact that transition is happening now. Newspapers have to change to address it otherwise that news that will be being delivered over the network 10 years from now wont be being coming from newspapers.