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Comment by aldarisbm | Hacker News Reader

at what point does this become news? dozens of people in a 140K employees company is not impactful, nor news worthy

I 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.

There’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.

What 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.

I 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.

They're doing layoffs still across the board.

e.g. Waymo two days ago https://www.marketwatch.com/story/alphabets-waymo-makes-more...

I think waymo is not google, they had some smaller alphabet companies dissolved I think in the past, and it just wasn't something newsworthy.

Yes, in the past they would find positions internally.

Buts it in the news division, so it’s of great interest to the people who decide what’s newsworthy.

News 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.

It 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.

I 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.

The 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.

> 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?

A 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.

They might be wrong with how high the rates are set, though, as large tech companies truly do seem to be getting out of this space, no longer considering it worth it.

Apple doesn’t seem to be, or have I missed something?

Apple doesn't run a search engine or a social network though? Do they even sell ads on news content?

Seems completely different to me.

If government regulators think we need more paid journalists then they could simply subsidize them, or even hire them directly like the BBC.

Isn’t a tax on aggregators’ ad revenue effectively that? It’s not saying that Google or Facebook can’t make plenty of money, only that they need to share some of their profits with the people whose work allowed them to make that profit in the first place.

Okay. If that’s the case, let the newspapers and Google negotiate. We already see who is hurt more when Google walks away

That appears to be in progress, so it looks like regulation is working.

You mean forcing Google to pay Rupert Murdoch who pushed for the legislation in Australia?

A link tax could be construed as a way to do that, particularly in countries in which these companies operate but do not really pay tax.

Well, in that case the newspapers should be able to offer something of enough value to get people to pay for it.

I haven’t seen that be the case. Can you provide specific examples?

But they aren't making enormous amounts of money from news content. Google News shows no ads, and never has. I've never seen an ad for a news query on search either, but can't say whether that's by policy or because nobody buys those searches. But it doesn't matter what the reason is: when there's no ad revenue, there's nothing to share.

Also, news sites have control over how their site shows up on Google. If they want to continue being indexed and show up in the search result with just a title and no snippet of the page, that's something they could make happen immediately just by themselves. That none of them are choosing to do so makes it pretty clear that the "people just read the summaries and don't click through to the article" thing isn't a problem in reality.

Yes, but they do show news along with ads on Google search results. My point isn’t that Google delivers no value but that we need to find a balance which pays for good journalism if we want healthy societies - the 20th century had local businesses paying for things like foreign reporting which kept subscribers but that clearly doesn’t work any more.

Like I said, I've never seen ads on the kinds of searches that return news. You're the one making claims about "enormous amounts of revenue" being generated by that. Have you seen ads next to news articles? Could you take a screenshot?

> we need to find a balance which pays for good journalism if we want healthy societies

Sure. Why do you think that it's search engines and social networks that should be doing the paying?

So in that case, the news organizations should just not allow Google to index their sites. Who do you think that’s going to hurt more - Google or the news orgs?

We already know the answer from other countries where Google was forced to share ad revenue or not index the papers.

That’s an option but it makes both of them less money. Google has pulled out of other countries as a negotiating tactic because they can afford to lose that money indefinitely but that does not mean it’s optimal for anyone.

If the content providers don't like that arrangement then they can simply opt out of Google News. No one is forcing them to participate.

That's not how the country's laws work, though. They fixed that "loophole".

Many countries are demanding Google pay for news reposting. This, while likely not linked, makes it more newsworthy.

It’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.

> 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?

Better 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.

Google are in charge of deciding what is considered misinformation?

Yes. 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.

Once they started a news aggregator, yes. Their brand is saying that the sites they include are informative and if they don’t want to take on that very modest expense compared to the massive amount of profit they should close Google News and stay out of the business.

People that use Google News probably want to know if Google is removing resources from the app.

Yeah, and I don't know any alternatives which do smart news clustering and ranking, as opposed to simple msn/yahoo-like aggregators.

Right. I want to know if Google News is going the route of Google Reader.

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