Can Google save your local paper? Not likely

The search giant's Fast Flip interface is supposed to breathe life into ailing publications. Cringely isn't flipping over it

I may post a blog entry three times a week, but I'm still an old newshound at heart. My soul is covered in newsprint. Scratch my skin and I bleed Indian ink (mixed with finely aged Scotch whiskey). As print publications keel over left and right, that makes me a member of an endangered species.

But Google has a plan to save the print industry -- at least, that's what it'd have you believe. The search mandarins have diagnosed the ailments currently plaguing the online appendages of the country's top newspapers and magazines and decided the problem is that the online publications' Web sites are too slow.

[ Also on InfoWorld, find out how Google is rescuing (or not) other industries: "The Google OS: Are we saved at last?" | Stay up to date on Robert X. Cringely's musings and observations with InfoWorld's Notes from the Underground newsletter. ]

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I may post a blog entry three times a week, but I'm still an old newshound at heart. My soul is covered in newsprint. Scratch my skin and I bleed Indian ink (mixed with finely aged Scotch whiskey). As print publications keel over left and right, that makes me a member of an endangered species.

But Google has a plan to save the print industry -- at least, that's what it'd have you believe. The search mandarins have diagnosed the ailments currently plaguing the online appendages of the country's top newspapers and magazines and decided the problem is that the online publications' Web sites are too slow.

[ Also on InfoWorld, find out how Google is rescuing (or not) other industries: "The Google OS: Are we saved at last?" | Stay up to date on Robert X. Cringely's musings and observations with InfoWorld's Notes from the Underground newsletter. ]

(That's like telling someone who's just been run over by an 18-wheeler that he's suffering an allergic reaction to rubber tires. But I digress.)

To address the "slowness" problem, Google Labs has unveiled Fast Flip, an experimental interface that displays thumbnail images of the publications' pages when you do a news search, instead of the usual headlines and summaries. Kind of like how you can flip through album covers on iTunes, only not quite as groovy. Clicking on the thumbnail image brings you to the Web site where the story actually appears.

Per IDG News' Juan Carlos Perez:

The idea is to try to replicate online the ease with which people flip through the pages of print magazines and newspapers in the offline world. This could motivate people to read more online, which Google argues will help publishers attract more readers and increase their revenue.

Let me see if I have this straight: It's not just a lack of speed that's killing the print industry, it's a lack of reader motivation. So if you just display pretty pictures of magazine and newspaper Web sites, everything will be right again. Do I have that right?

I'm not the only one who's scratching his head over Fast Flip. Cnet's Rafe Needleman calls it "the platypus of news readers" (thus insulting yet another endangered species):

In Fast Flip, you can only scan left and right (page by page). You can't read down the page. If you click anywhere on the page, you leave Fast Flip and go to the Web. Links don't work. And multimedia doesn't work on the page either. ... On the mobile versions of Fast Flip, zooming in on a column is likely to leave you with text at a readable size but displayed on a column that's too wide to read without scrolling back and forth, making the feature rather useless. Hey Google, wasn't HTML invented for a reason?

He concludes: "if your brain is stuck in 1969 and you want to pretend that new-fangled computer in front of you is a microfilm reader, it'll feel natural to use." Oh, snap.

Next, they'll be installing hand cranks on keyboards to make it easier to scroll left and right through the thumbnails.

It's amazing to me that otherwise savvy people like Google -- and its three dozen online content partners, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Esquire, and Salon -- can say Fast Flip is likely to make any real difference and still keep a straight face.

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