Over tea and toast on my last visit to London, Edward Roussel, head of digital for the Telegraph, said he had pondered the question posed by the title of the book I'm writing - What Would Google Do? - and answered with a striking vision for newspapers: what if they handed over much of their work to Google? Roussel reasoned that Google already is the best distributor online; it's hard to imagine a newspaper creating better technology than Google. And the service is proving to be brilliant at ad sales - so why not outsource those departments to Google so a paper can concentrate on its real job - journalism?
Roussel was actually asking and answering what business a newspaper is really in. The next day at the Guardian, in one of its Future of Journalism seminars, I suggested that it, too, must make that critical decision. AOL thought it was in the content business, but it was actually in the community business before anyone else - AOL should have been Facebook. Yahoo, too, thought it was about content -instead, it was in the ad business long before Google. Yahoo should have been Google.
Newspapers are in the wrong businesses. They should no longer be in manufacturing and distribution, which have become cost-heavy yokes. And they should no longer try to be in the technology business - because they're bad at it. When I said this on my blog, Bob Wyman, a technology entrepreneur now at Google, commented that technology infrastructure "is a cost of doing business. It is not a thing of value." So I asked him whether Google should fulfil Roussel's vision as a paper's new pressroom.
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