Google News has been going bad for a long time. But that’s probably not entirely on Google. The news business has been going bad for a long time, and has gotten

Google News has been going bad for a long time. But that’s probably not entirely on Google. The news business has been going bad for a long time, and has gotten even worse in the past year as a lot of legacy news organizations completely fold, or operate on an absolute skeleton crew. The meaningful content is behind paywalls. (Yes, I know, that’s a broad generalization, but between the NYTimes, the Economist, WSJ…that’s a lot of paywalled content.) Voice Assistant is a somewhat surprise flop. For a while there, voice assistants were The Big Thing that you had to have. Maybe they saw the metrics and realized everybody eventually gave up in frustration once you realized that outside of setting timers, the interaction model doesn’t scale well.