I can scarcely remember what the world was like before Google.
Google is like a magic box that's full of everything I need. It's infinitely large, yet takes up no space. I can find a house in Mexico to rent, look at paintings in the Prado or listen in on Tiger Woods's ill-considered voice mail to that bar girl. It's a priceless resource. I can put together a research file on any subject, identify the top experts in the field anywhere in the world and e-mail them right away to ask a question or request an interview. Amazingly, they usually e-mail me right back.
People over 60 sometimes ask how many researchers I have working for me. The answer is none. Who needs researchers when you have Google?
Google is the best thing that ever happened to people in the media. It's also the worst thing. To many of us in newspapers and TV and books and advertising and the rest of the once-glamorous Old Media world, Google looks more like Googzilla. It's a scary monster that leaves devastation in its wake. No wonder the mood in the Old Media is distinctly elegiac.
“For those of us who work in Manhattan media,” writes New York Times columnist David Carr, “it means that a life of occasional excess and prerogative has been replaced by a drum beat of goodbye speeches with sheet cakes and cheap sparkling wine. It's a wan reminder that all reigns are temporary.” Even The Washington Post is closing its remaining domestic bureaus outside the U.S. capital. “We are not a national news organization of record serving a general audience,” the executive editor said.
Not that there's no life after journalism. I was consoled to learn that one top editor at Denver's Rocky Mountain News, which folded last February, has found a job supervising urine samples.
Google's mission is thrilling, idealistic and seemingly benign. It is to make information accessible and free. “The technology empowers you to choose what you want, when you want it,” says Ken Auletta, the New Yorker writer who was in Toronto this week to promote his new book, Googled. The ominous subtitle – The End of the World As We Know It – refers not only to the way that Google is transforming our relationship to information but to the way it's annihilating the business model of large swaths of the economy.
Mr. Auletta tells a terrific story about a conversation he had with Microsoft's Bill Gates back in 1998. “What keeps you up at night?” he asked. Mr. Gates replied that what worried him most was not the competition he saw all around him. It was the fear that, somewhere, there might be two guys in a garage dreaming up something completely new.
There were. Their names were Sergey Brin and Larry Page. By 2008, 10 years later, their garage startup had revenues of more than $22-billion and was in full-on competition with Microsoft. Google's revenues now surpass the revenues of the four U.S. television networks combined, and as well as all the advertising revenues of the entire U.S. magazine industry.
Nearly all that money comes from those dopey three-line ads (Fat Loss 4 Idiots) that you never click on but other people obviously do. Advertisers love them, because they only pay when someone clicks. No more waste or inefficiency. To add to the pain, Google's own content is stealing time (and audiences) from everyone else. If you're watching funny cat tricks on YouTube, chances are you're not watching Peter Mansbridge.
