Digital lessons from a Google exec, a casino mogul, Darwin and a tortoise Media Man Australia

Digital lessons from a Google exec, a casino mogul, Darwin and a tortoise -

Wires and Lights in a Box - 24th September 2009
(Credit: The Australian)

Vickey Williams - Strange things happen in Vegas every day so it wasn’t weird at all to hear a casino mogul and a Google executive advise newspaper editors on the evolution of their industry.
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Richard Gingras, a senior adviser at Google who has spent the last year studying the online giant’s relationship with and impact on the news industry, won over what could have been a prickly crowd by stating the obvious. “Google will impact the evolution of news whether it does anything or not,” he said. “Better to impact it in a positive way.”
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“Lots of times the question is: What’s the standard for our website? Is it ‘Just put it online and it doesn’t matter’? Or is the expectation of the online delivery of our paper the same as print,” that is, providing a robust, quality experience for the consumer?

Will Sullivan, interactive director of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, said the speed of the transition to a day where online staff are looked at as holding the keys to a newspaper’s future may have left other things unsaid. “At the start, they were made to feel like a production department. So change the expectations.”

Read ‘Digital lessons from a Google exec, a casino mogul, Darwin and a tortoise’ at Readership Institute.

Greg Tingle comment...

We are all in the communications, people and advertising business, whether it's officially Google, a casino, or another type of business. It was News Corp’s own Rupert Murdoch who went on record with, “Big will not beat slow anymore, it will be the fast beating the slow”. Google used to be a very small operation run by a couple of guys out of a garage. Via evolution, being quick to capitalize, positive word of mouth, online buzz and a solid advertising based business model, they became huge. Now they even have Google News, and they move at the speed of news most of the time. Switched on casinos are also moving into the online casino world and also providing online casino news media updates. It’s about content, relevance and engaging with the audience, online or not.

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