GrodsCorp

The latest trend in journalism

Wednesday 24 May 2006, 4:31 pm

Categories: Media

We’re all used to the modern media practice of cutting and pasting media releases or wire stories, punching out a silly headline and calling it journalism. We’ve even become accustomed to Google-journalism where lazy hacks report the number of hits a keyword receives on the leading search engine as if that worthless statistic has anything to do with anything. But a form of journalism that’s only in its infancy but already horribly frustrating is Google Trends-journalism.

The Age loves this new Google toy and its ever-shrinking team of ~~work experience cadets~~ journalists have embraced it without question. A few weeks ago there was a non-story in that paper about Melbourne being the fifth (or something) most depressed city in the world. Was this reporting based on a scientific report? A journal article? Another newspaper? No, it was based on a search of Google Trends. And now, high on the rush of pride following that Walkley award winning bit of journalism, The Age proudly reports that New Zealanders Google for “sheep” more than any other country.

Sometimes The Editor thinks that the newsagent accidentally throws MX onto his porch each morning.

7 Comments

Greeny (Wednesday 24 May 2006, 8:58 pm) #

Fairfax senior hacks are absolutely packing their trousers when they even think about the internet and what it will do to their audience in the future - and so they write this shit as a means of making themselves feel better. The Bulletin is also a major offender. (pls, I was forced to read the Bulletin while waiting in a dentist surgery, honest!)
Bookmanoldstyle (Wednesday 24 May 2006, 9:08 pm) #

How disappointment. I mean, journalism by google search is one thing, but google trends is quite another.

It’s a fun tool but the sample size seems to completely thrown out the results. For example, recently I did google trends search for ‘vegetarian’in Australia. The top three came out as Canberra, Sydney, … and Cranbourne. Maybe I’ve missed out on this vegetarian mecca because I live in NSW, but felt like there was one uber-googler in Cranbourne who’d managed to squeeze out the whole of Melbourne.
The Editor (Thursday 25 May 2006, 1:13 pm) #

And I bet you only read Playboy for the articles, Greeny.

BOS, you haven’t lived until you’ve been to Cranbourne.
weezil (Thursday 25 May 2006, 4:40 pm) #

In a notation highlighting the anomalies of what is new, pop & hip on the net, Nielsen has had a feature called BlogPulse for about 6 months which does precisely what Google Trends does.

O frabjous day, calooh, callay! We’re once again audience-metered.
jLo (Friday 26 May 2006, 8:05 am) #

How hard would it be to stack a Google Trend?

I only ask because it strikes me that it would be excellent fun to start one and then see if we could get it reported in the mainstream media. It’d be taking Operation Age Incursion to a whole new level…
weezil (Friday 26 May 2006, 9:33 am) #

jLo, good question. Bet it wouldn’t be much harder than the typical Googlebombing exercise.

Google skews the page ranking of blogs much more highly than other sources, so we ‘citizen journalists’ are probably halfway there.

It took about 15-20 bloggers to put the lying sack of shit at the top of the pageranks back in Feb 2005.
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