Feeding The Search Beast: Google Acquires Restaurant Guide, Zagat

Thirty points out of thirty. That’s how restaurant guide Zagat ranked its own acquisition by Google earlier today with a now-famous dining out scale.

Zagat-o-philes, too, will likely approve of the deal, which will help Google deliver even better localized restaurant, foodie, and nightlife search results.

In a letter posted on Zagat’s website husband and wife team Tim and Nina Zagat referred to their 32-year-old company as a longtime innovator in user-generated content. “Google delivers the most relevant and high-quality information, and it's the perfect home for our content,” they wrote. “We are thrilled to see our baby placed in such good hands and to start today as official ‘Googlers.’”

But Brad McCarty, blogger for thenextweb blog rightly points out there’s more going on than just improving Google searches and an older company moving into the "next course" of its career. Besides, the Zagat app for mobile devices is already onto version 4.0.4 and the latest one was launched just last month. Are foodies so ravenous for better search results?

The purchase by the behemoth search engine – and the anything and everything portal to the web – comes some three years after Zagat reportedly put itself up for sale for $200 million but then backed out of the process. Today, Zagat will join ranks with the 100+ other companies already purchased by Google. Considering Google’s increasing forays into other travel-related ventures, there’s no telling what other markets Google plans on gobbling up next.

Advertising Age agrees, and says “the internet giant is starting to look a little more like a media company.”

The Very Hungry Google

From a PR perspective, such developments reinforce the need to make certain our clients figure prominently in Google searches. Our stories and releases must take into account search optimization and search marketing - it's no longer an afterthought, but embedded in our thinking and our products.

The web, and Google, continue to remake how we as communications experts package and deliver our clients’ messages right down to the local dining out guide.

All this talk of restaurants and dining out has made me hungry and on that note, I'm off for a bite.

Is Journalism As We Know It Becoming Obsolete?

Not yet. But a few prayers couldn’t hurt.

Last week Gigaom.com blogger Matthew Ingram resurrected the decade-old question: is journalism as we know it becoming obsolete? His answer – after a nearly 900-word build up:

No. “I would rather say it as evolving and expanding — and I happen to believe that’s a good thing,” he writes.

Pardon the bluntness, but to me that doesn’t read like a satisfying conclusion. The cells in my stomach are evolving, dividing one by one, millisecond by millisecond, year by year. My stomach expands with each new meal I consume. But without a little help from digestion and peristalsis to keep that expansion in check or DNA coding to prevent runaway “cell evolution,” my body would grow sick and unable to function.

If left unchecked I’d land in the Morgue – the place where humans – and newspapers ultimately retire.

To conclude that today’s twitter-centric and blog-frenzied journalism is “evolving and expanding” isn’t good enough. Chalking the process up to the cyclical “rise and fall” of newspapers and bloggers doesn’t cut it either. A more nuanced question is: how is journalism expanding and evolving and what safeguards, if any, are working to ensure its healthy growth?

Ingram rightly points out that journalism is about: “a spirit of inquiry, of curiosity, of wanting to make sense of things.” He’s also correct when he references programming scholar Dave Winter’s suggestion that in today’s world, with often zero mass publishing barriers, anyone can do it.

But the fact that “anyone can do it” doesn’t mean that everyone can do it equally well. Possessing a spirit of enquiry, of curiosity, and of wanting to make sense of things are platitudes that can be applied to almost any profession.

Eighteenth and 19^th century journalism, wrought with hyper opinion, political party dominance, and a healthy dose of sensationalism effectively blurred the lines of hard news, soft news, and what today would be called “infotainment.” Not until the middle and latter 20^th century did a more separation of church and state-like thinking transform journalism into today’s polished and professional product.

It’s not that today’s citizen journalists, CNN’s iReporters or Arab Spring bloggers are bad. It’s just that too often their skills are unrefined.

To be sure, gathering facts, observing breaking news, and collecting what else has been written on a topic – termed aggregating on the web – is the first step toward quality journalism. But placing that information into a compelling and concise narrative with context and fact-checked sources is where the professional differences lie. A world where citizen journalists, bloggers, and traditional reporters remember they’re playing on the same team, in equal numbers would be the best way to ensure that the hard fought professional standards achievements of the 20^th century and the internet mass publishing miracles of the 21^st work in concert, not in chaos.

In the last decade, as newspapers and other print formats struggle to engineer the magic bullet of profitable web publishing, thousands of professional journalists have left the profession entirely, jumping ship for the perceived safer and often better-paying waters of public relations, corporate communications and government outreach.

An industry losing its institutional knowledge is an industry in danger of losing itself.

Is journalism as we know it becoming obsolete?

Only if we let it.