{"id":255888,"date":"2019-06-10T15:52:49","date_gmt":"2019-06-10T15:52:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mathewingram.blog\/?p=12"},"modified":"2019-06-10T15:52:49","modified_gmt":"2019-06-10T15:52:49","slug":"nyt-promotes-questionable-study-on-google-and-the-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2019\/06\/10\/nyt-promotes-questionable-study-on-google-and-the-media\/","title":{"rendered":"NYT promotes questionable study on Google and the media"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Note<\/strong>: This is something I\u00a0originally wrote<\/a>\u00a0for the New Gatekeepers blog at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I\u2019m the chief digital writer<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A New York Times<\/em> story published on Sunday contains<\/a> an eye-opening allegation: it says that Google “made $4.7 billion from the news industry in 2018,” according to a new report. The lede of the story quotes the figure again, with all of the zeroes, and mentions that this number is “more than the combined ticket sales of the last two Avengers movies,” and is more than what most professional sports teams are worth (the writer of the story usually covers college sports, according to his Times<\/em> bio). As it turns out, the report<\/a> was published by the News Media Alliance, a media-industry lobby group formerly known as the Newspaper Association of America, and the figure quoted by the Times<\/em>\u2014without any critical assessment whatsoever\u2014appears to be based almost entirely on questionable mathematical extrapolation from a comment made by a former Google executive more than a decade ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After quoting the head of the News Media Alliance, David Chavern, as saying newspapers deserve a cut of that $4.7 billion, and that the NMA believes this estimate is actually “conservative,” the Times<\/em> story notes the number is based in part on a study done by a consulting firm called Keystone Strategy. That study in turn relies on a public comment by<\/a> then-Google executive Marissa Mayer at a public event in 2008, when she estimated that Google News brought in $100 million in revenue. The News Media Alliance appears to have come up with the current figure<\/a> in part by extrapolating from this comment, assuming that Google News revenue would make up the same proportion of the company’s revenue as $100 million was in 2008, and also that news consumption via Google’s main search is 6 times larger than via Google News (the report says this is based on referral traffic to newspaper websites).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A number of prominent journalists and media-industry observers have publicly scoffed at both the number and the report itself, and also questioned the desire of the Times to publicize such a thinly-sourced study without more skepticism (the Times<\/em> didn\u2019t respond to multiple requests for comment from CJR). Aron Pilhofer, former head of digital at The Guardian<\/em> in the UK, and now the Chair of Journalism Innovation at Temple University, called the report’s conclusions<\/a> “nonsense,” while Dan Gillmor, who runs the News Co\/Lab at Arizona State University, said<\/a> the Times<\/em> embarrassed itself by running the story. Damon Kiesow, a journalism professor at Missouri University, said the NMA report<\/a> was “a recap of all the complaints publishers have spouted at Google in the past decade,” and that it contained “no rational economic argument aside from the specious math the NYT reported.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A group called the News Media Alliance got the NYT to run a piece last night saying that Google made "$4.7 billion" from the news industry.

And now that the study is out, the number appears to be just as shaky as it initially seemed to a few of us. 1\/5 https:\/\/t.co\/LKUkZqUGDw<\/a><\/p>— Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin) June 10, 2019<\/a><\/blockquote>