Google Fast Flip Offers Publishers new Challenge

Work to do for all publishers. As Google is releasing its newest lab baby Fast Flip, it’s obvious that the real winners will be the best designed news sites. They will get much more clicks than they used to in the text based Google News.

Fast Flip expands the functionalities of Google News. It combines some of the qualities of print and the Web, letting a user “flip” through pages online as easy as flipping through a magazine. The service is filled with the same news, feature stories, opinion pieces and other journalism that we have seen already in Google News. It offers a more visual interface: a screenshot instead of e few lines of text. Fast Flip partners with about forty top-notch publishers such as the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, ProPublica, Slate and Newsweek.

Google’s Krishna Bharat, the developer of Google News, has also played a major role in designing Fast Flip. In his company weblog he says “the publishing industry faces many challenges today, and there is no magic bullet. However, we believe that encouraging readers to read more news is a necessary part of the solution. We think Fast Flip could be one way to help, and we’re looking to find other ways to help as well in the near future.”

Josh Cohen, senior business product manager for Google News, expects users to be able to discover and consume new content more easily than before. “Fast Flip enables you to get an offline experience with all the online advantages.” Although Cohen feels very certain that Fast Flip can help publishers get more visitors and money (revenue sharing is part of the deal), he denies it has been released from the lab to take away some of the anger they have against Google. “Our only motivation is to always find better ways to consume information online. There still is a lot of room for innovation and this is just one example.”

Newspaper publishers from all over the world have been attacking Google because it aggregates their content and in a way republishes it through Google News. Although Google has alway denied that it does something wrong (the company says it’s just helping people find what they are looking for and at the same time enables publishers to reach larger audiences) , there have been some approaches lately between Google and the publishers. Most notable in this field was last week’s proposal to jointly set up a system for micropayments.

Even when Google says it has the support of famous traditional news brands like the New York Times and the Washington Post, some of them won’t like what they see. Again, more of their original content will be shared through Google News: first a headline and a couple of lines, now a complete screenshot, with sometimes readable articles. Depending on how web savvy the publisher wants to be, either new criticism will be expressed – or the design department will be ordered to develop a new, Fast Flip based design for their web articles. But either way, it is Google that determines the rate and the publishers will have to react again. Which must be annoying for an industry that’s so desperately yearning for some decisive steps by themselves.