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Google cuts dozens of jobs in news division
- gumballindie 3y agoMany news writers can easily be freed up and replaced by procedural text generators such as llms. Both generate equally misleading and inaccurate “news”, but at least procedural generators are more humane.
- aldarisbm 3y agoat what point does this become news? dozens of people in a 140K employees company is not impactful, nor news worthy
- ngetchell 3y agoPeople that use Google News probably want to know if Google is removing resources from the app.
- marbletiles 3y agoNews that affects the news industry always has a priority for news outlets, obviously. The fact that it's a tiny percentage of the staff is neither here nor there: if Apple laid off a few dozens from its core hardware design team, that'd be newsworthy too. There is a lot going on right now, with Google + Meta at the centre of possible regulation over news links; with the wars in Israel and Ukraine causing spikes in misinformation; with American trust in news at historic lows, and with X's disbanding of its Trust&Safety team leading to a rise in misinformation on the platform; any withdrawal from a service as prominent as Google's News is going to be noteworthy.
- CydeWeys 3y agoIt does seem like, because of all the national laws requiring big tech companies to pay news organizations merely for linking them, that big tech companies are increasingly getting out of the news business. And I don't blame them.
- acdha 3y agoI do think it’s worth remembering that Google makes enormous amounts of money from the news companies’ content and knows that a fair fraction of readers only read the summary without visiting the source. Sharing that ad revenue seems fair given the comparative levels of contribution.
- sh1tpostexposer 3y ago[flagged]
- blululu 3y agoThe laws in question are more or less devoid of any fiscal definition of fairness. They operate on a vague sense of envy that someone might be making more money than a preferred class. If the distribution of revenue were still profitable to Google then I don’t see why Google and Facebook would both be spending NRE to make less money.
- isykt 3y ago> They operate on a vague sense of envy that someone might be making more money than a preferred class They operate on the principle that without revenue the people doing the actual work of journalism will go out of business. Do you think the regulators are wrong on that point?
- blululu 3y agoA link tax is fine in principle and can be good policy in a number of situations. In practice such a tax needs to be set in such a way that all parties make money for their efforts. The rates given in the Canadian and Australian taxes were basically made up by media companies and represented a significant inflation of the value of their content.
- Mordisquitos 3y agoI suppose it can be newsworthy to the extent that Google's news division has any editorial control over its content and influence on global discourse, and to what extent are those ~40 people a significant proportion of Google News itself—are they 5000 staff total, or are they just 200? What department took the brunt of the layoffs: admin, engineering, content...? To be clear, I have no opinion or information either way. I'm just providing some conditions under which it could be considered newsworthy.
- b112 3y agoMany countries are demanding Google pay for news reposting. This, while likely not linked, makes it more newsworthy.
- tyingq 3y agoWhat it might mean that they are specifically reducing headcount in their news division is the interest point. Not the impact to the company as a whole. Not just this, but for example, the discourse around big tech companies introducing bias into "news" is increasing. So reductions in those teams is itself newsworthy.
- CydeWeys 3y agoI think it's news because Google is still doing ongoing layoffs. Admittedly, smaller ones than in January, but it's still going on. So the overall SWE hiring landscape is still pretty rough.
- siggen 3y agoYes, in the past they would find positions internally.
- ulfw 3y agoThey're doing layoffs still across the board. e.g. Waymo two days ago https://www.marketwatch.com/story/alphabets-waymo-makes-more-job-cuts-b5e2ebea https://www.marketwatch.com/story/alphabets-waymo-makes-more...
- riku_iki 3y agoI think waymo is not google, they had some smaller alphabet companies dissolved I think in the past, and it just wasn't something newsworthy.
- imgabe 3y agoButs it in the news division, so it’s of great interest to the people who decide what’s newsworthy.
- speak_plainly 3y agoThere’s a lot of interest in Google News right now by G7 countries that want to shake it down for cash. Australia was successful, Canada is in the middle of the implementation of legislation (goes into effect in December) and Google is likely going to remove news and all news links in response, and it sounds like the US is in the process of drafting similar legislation.
- acdha 3y agoIt’s important because the news industry is important, and companies like Google siphoned off billions of dollars from the media. Democracies require well informed citizens and we know there are well-funded operations producing fake news-like stories trying to sway public opinion, which raises the concern that performative layoffs will leave Google less prepared to stop misinformation efforts.
- rrdharan 3y ago> companies like Google siphoned off billions of dollars from the media How exactly did they do that? You mean by being better distributors of advertisements?
- acdha 3y agoBetter advertisements, yes, but also things like adjusting search placement based on adopting Google’s ad network (AMP) or using their content to promote unrelated applications. AMP, Google+, Facebook pages & especially the infamous pivot to video were all exercises in pushing the media industry to promote things which were important to the ad companies but not their users. The other common trend here was offering competitive pricing until they had enough market share to force less generous terms. We joke about even prestige journalism writing like Buzzfeed but that was responding to the incentives set by ad-tech companies. Again, I’m not saying Google or Facebook should get nothing - only that we should recognize that paying journalists is expensive and they were successful for several decades at getting a great deal of profit from that work without compensation. If you don’t want to live in a world awash with quasi-spam, clickbait, and propaganda we need to figure out a better balance where people can make a decent income doing quality journalism.
- brainphreeze 3y agoGoogle are in charge of deciding what is considered misinformation?
- sandworm101 3y agoYes. Anyone operating a news service is volunteering to do exactly that. Dont want the responsibility? Dont open a news website or other service. Stick to cat videos.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago> Both wars have spawned a surge in the spread of misinformation across the web, heightening the importance of Google and other sites that users count on to find up-to-date news That is so hypocritical coming from the news industry that this past week had massive headlines saying Israel bombed a hospital prompting massive riots across the Middle East, when the truth was that an Islamic Jihad missile misfired and blew up in the parking lot of the hospital. The misinformation spread by the news media probably did as much harm as any spread on tech company platforms. They seem to want censorship for everyone else, while wanting “freedom of the press” for themselves.
- wenebego 3y agoSource?
- tyingq 3y agoIt's still quoted that way by some major news organizations[1], though now the stories have "Gaza Officials Claim..." they didn't earlier. Though they seem to now be trying a new "it's not clear" angle[2]. Note there's also plenty of misinformation on other news items that's in Israel's favor. Personally, it's hard for me to cast too much judgement on this particular kind of reporting, given there's quite a lot of indiscriminate bombing in densely populated areas. And a huge incentive to use anything you can to help promote a cease fire. [1] One example: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/10/17/photos-an-israeli-air-raid-on-al-ahli-arab-hospital-kills-an-estimated-500 https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/10/17/photos-an-israe... [2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/20/what-have-open-source-videos-revealed-about-the-gaza-hospital-explosion https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/20/what-have-open-sou...
- chasil 3y agoThis is an article on the Times of Israel on the subject: https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-presents-evidence-misfired-gazan-rocket-caused-hospital-blast-slams-hamas-lies/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-presents-evidence-misfired... This article exposes a recorded telephone conversation (which could easily be faked) that this was "friendly fire." The lack of a crater at the impact site, and minimal damage to surrounding buildings, rules out the standard ordinance used by the IDF (although something custom could have been used in this case in an elaborate attempt to shift/inflict blame, but unlikely by reason of Occam's Razor). This article on Al Jazeera reports the assessment of French intelligence that the IDF was not responsible: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/21/french-intel-says-palestinian-rocket-likely-cause-of-gaza-hospital-blast https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/21/french-intel-says-... The above article casts some doubt on the Israeli assertions (and French assessment) and reports on calls by the U.N. for a full investigation. The well-known video of the explosion has a high-pitched whine which would not be heard in the standard munitions used by the IDF, which do not have propulsion as I understand. https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2023/10/18/gaza-health-ministry-says-hundreds-killed-in-strike-on-gaza-hospital https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2023/10/18/gaza-h... This is either an accidental weapons malfunction, or a false-flag attempt, but the later seems unlikely as the Israeli government response seemed somewhat muted if it were planned by them.
- Jellyfish19 3y agoTo this day, I don't understand why the Discover section on new tabs in mobile Chrome is disconnected from Google News. It makes no sense to be managing interests and news sources in both places, but here we are and here we've been for years.
- smeej 3y agoThis might just be a contrarian take on my part, but maybe we'd be better off without Google News--and most of the publishers it features. When was the last time you read a news article in any "major" news source, of the kind that typically appears on Google News, about a subject you know well and you thought, "This demonstrates an accurate understanding of even the big picture elements of the story"? I don't remember having had this experience since I was a child, decades ago. I was a teenager when I first extrapolated that if they couldn't report with even big picture accuracy on the things I did know something about, odds were that they were similarly wrong about all the things I didn't know about too. With that perspective in mind, it's come down to a question for me of whether it is good or bad for my life to be immersed, near-constantly, in stories about (usually awful) things happening in parts of the world that I can't do a thing about. I don't think it is. I think that's what leads people to feel powerless and to live in fear. It leads to this "victimer than thou" culture where people act like (and largely feel like) their only hope for surviving something difficult that might happen in their own lives would be to get enough sympathy from a large enough audience that people would actually help. Nobody feels like an agent anymore because they're constantly immersed in stories of awful things in which they don't have any agency. There's this broad cultural assumption that "one must be informed about world affairs," but it's at the expense of local affairs, the affairs we could affect. If you know about violence on the other side of the planet, but don't know that your neighbor three doors down is having trouble getting to work and at risk of losing their job because their car broke down, I'd strongly argue that your priorities are out of whack. People's lives everywhere are getting worse because we're all worrying about things far away that we can't affect rather than local problems we could actually solve. I'd just as soon see Google News shutter. I think we would all be better off without the 24-hour global news cycle.
- civilitty 3y agoIt’s not the news itself at fault, it’s how sensationalized and emotionally triggering everything is designed to be from the story selection to the editorial control over titles. Everything is framed to generate either outrage or my-team-won fuzzies. I follow current events by reading the wikipedia current events portal [1] so I can stay informed without all the manipulation. It’s a completely different experience from the newsmedia: biases are still aplenty but they’re downright quaint when stacked against commercial incentives. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
- majikaja 3y agoWhat RSS-capable alternative is there? Even the paid experience of news sites is horrible. FT is the only one I feel positively about.
- Eumenes 3y agoOh no .... anyway
- kunalgupta 3y agoHah, I actually finally started using Google News after 10 years because it looks like Twitter 2023 is effectively completely broken for news. I was grateful that at least we could revert to 10 years ago, now our current best mechanism of finding truth
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- megous 3y agoI guess they'll survive. Next. So many "we layed off some people" articles here to flag these days.
- joshe 3y ago10 years ago, I thought it was important have newsrooms reporting on current events. But now it's so schlocky, even on things I agree with them on, that I think they do more harm than good. Really anyone who has to come up with something shocking to report everyday is going to put out garbage. I include in this major city newspapers, news only websites (like tech press), network and cable news, and weekly magazines. Here are two good breakdowns of the problems/limits of modern mainstream news. https://www.natesilver.net/p/journalism-needs-more-taylor-swift https://www.natesilver.net/p/journalism-needs-more-taylor-sw... https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1714648538746118265 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1714648538746118265 Americans wisely agree, trust in media is very low https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-remains-near-record-low.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-re.... It's worth pointing out that mass media has had a brief lifespan, about from the 1920s. And the "golden age" when everyone was following it was really only 1950 to 2000. It's fine if it declines, and even if it disappears. Canada's accidental banning of links to news is a good model, we should do it in the US. Let's tax any links to news sites from major web platforms.
- eastbound 3y agoDo you mean, news have a cost to society? We should tax the presence of news on Bing’s homepage, in your iPhone notifications, on television? I agree, but those in power don’t. Maybe we should rather tax hyperboles and keywords like “Alert!” at the beginning of tweets. “Breaking news!”. It’s so stressing I auto-ban authors who use them. Any usage of the red color on television. Usage of flashes and running messages. We should come up with a way to measure the equivalent of loudness (TV, radio and ads are all standardized in average authorized loudness) but for alertness. We should smoothe out the level of alertness, across all digital screens.
- zzzeek 3y agoyou want the government to place a tax on linking to newspapers ? I think the first amendment might have a few words on that
- AlbertCory 3y agoI will be a contrarian here, since it's been in plain sight for 20+ years and everyone loves to hate it: I think Wikipedia is about the most objective source out there. Before you jump on selective examples of bias: no, it's not perfect and IS full of BS and errors. But I would believe something they said long before believing anything in NYT or WaPo. They make a much stronger effort to be fair and complete than any major news outlet does. I think their reviled editing process at least serves the function of asking writers, "Is this a fair summary?" most of the time. It's easy to see that the mainstream media gave up on that a long time ago. (and yes, some of the bio pages are written by the subjects.)
- momothereal 3y agoThe "Current events" portal is my main source of international news. I love the density of information, link to varied sources, and direct links to Wikipedia articles for background information. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events