Jarvis' next question: What will rise out of the ashes?

Jeff Jarvis recently participated, via video-link, in a digital conference panel talking about Twitter. If you looked closely you could spy his book in the background, carefully angled on the bookshelf.

When I meet him in person at his office at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School of Journalism, where he is associate professor and director of the interactive journalism programme, it turns out that the book is in exactly the same position. It seems that is its permanent home - for the benefit of the video-casts, perhaps. What quickly catches my attention though is his lapel badge asking 'What Would Google Do?'.

It's a reminder, though I'm probably unlikely to forget, of his book's title, a question he coined while participating in another journalism conference. "I was exasperated by people saying Google was the enemy," he says.

The focus was on how to draw people to their products, he said. "I was saying no, you've got to think what would Google do? And bing! Book title."

Jarvis re-tweeted the picture that captured his self-promotion: he is certainly not worried about being seen as a brand, despite the criticism he sometimes gets for it. Journalism has always been about brands, he says.

"Most journalists I know are dying for Google juice themselves," he says, referring to the boost that search engine results give to journalists' work. It can help them in a personal way when they are made redundant and need to establish their individual online presence, he adds.

The real problem Jarvis says, is when egos, rather than brands, get in the way.

This is how homogenised news, limited in scope, gets created, he says. For example, during the US election campaign, news organisations sent 15,000 journalists, 'out of institutional ego', to cover the same ground, so each publication could have 'our man in New York' or 'our man in Denver'. "To do what?" asks Jarvis.

Journalists care a lot more about bylines than their readers, he says.

When he was working as a reporter in Chicago, where his parents lived, his mother would ring up to tell him about a piece of news: 'Did you see this?' she would ask him: "'I'd say yes - Ma I wrote it!' My own mother didn't notice my byline. Our own byline matters to us a lot more than anyone else."

The link economy
Those familiar with Jarvis' book, his regular slot in MediaGuardian (alongside which he will now do a monthly US podcast), his blog, Buzzmachine, and his conference appearances, will need no introduction to the 'link economy', last week cited by the Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington.

Part of it is the idea, widely used by many of his fellow online commentators, that you should 'do what you do best and link to the rest'.

"I talk about the content economy versus the link economy. In the content economy you can take one copy and syndicate to multiple publications; in the link economy that's just not the case," he says.

"You only need one copy in the link economy and links to it; content with no links has no value; content gains value with links. He or she who gets the links should monetise it; should figure it out. So, the economic model of media changes."

Jarvis has no ethical problem with the introduction of advertising on Google News: to disagree with it is 'like saying the newsstand shouldn't make any money', he says.

Refusing to play the Google game is 'madness': "It's acting as if there's some God-given right to that revenue - and there isn't. Should newspapers, because newspapers got a cut of the real estate market all these years, have a right to that? No. The fact that Craigslist and the internet took them out as middle-men - that's business. That's life."

"They should be actually grateful that Google doesn't charge them. Google is the newsstand. Google adds news value every time it sends links. And so, by rights Google could stand back and say, well, we'll only link to you if you pay us.

"I don't think Google would ever do that," he adds. "But in the economics of it..." The sentence trails off.

Disclosures and work with the Guardian
This strand of the conversation leads to one of his many disclosures, for which he is known for making: he's a partner in Daylife and consultant to Publish2: online news aggregation start-ups both advocating the 'link economy' philosophy.

Is all this disclosure really necessary? "I think it's a disclosure of what's relevant. I think more transparency is necessary," he says.

As such, when talking about the Guardian's 'invasion' of the US, he makes his interest - as a columnist and occasional adviser - clear.

He was 'tangentially' involved in talks with both sides before the sale of Content Next and its paidContent blogs to the Guardian, for example, he says.

It was a move he thinks was about the Guardian's 'media specialisation', rather than as a way of conquering the American market.

I put a Twitter-sourced question to him: what did he mean when he once tweeted that the Huffington Post and the Guardian are now entering the same space?

"The Guardian, when they saw Huffington Post, they thought, 'damn - we should have done that' and they did, with Comment is Free.

"I don't think Huffington Post will ever have a newsroom the size of the Guardian, or that the Guardian will ever be quite as partisan as Huffington Post, but it's interesting to me that notions of comment and reporting are complementary and belong together. That's what this says to me."

'Out of the ashes'
So: Google has messed up things for the news models of old and they've failed to respond; what now? What's the title of the next book?

It's more about what the newspapers will do than what Google is doing, he says. He is grappling with the 'transition of change', he adds.

"I had my mind's eye that there would be an orderly transition of change, like a January 20 moment, where the current President leaves. I now realise that was naive because that assumed news companies could change radically, disrupt themselves, and they're not motivated to.

"So I'm trying to think through, or suggest, ways incumbents could change. Maybe what happens is that the incumbents die. What comes in their place and what does that look like?

"They're [newspapers] designed to protect themselves. Newspapers are going to die left, right, centre. I'm interested in this idea of what comes out of the ashes."

Citing another internet philosopher, Clay Shirky, Jarvis says there has been an overload of information and a 'failure of the filter'.

Google is enabling abundance, he says, yet 'we're still trying to sell advertising based on scarcity'. "We haven't learnt from Google," he explains.

"It sounds too much like a sequel but what's interesting me is the realisation that what we're going through now is not a mere financial crisis (...) it's a massive re-structuring.

"This internet thing gave us a second childhood. It's wonderful to see things differently. I see friends who are doing the same thing they were doing 20 years ago and I'm glad that's not me. The world's changing and the more we can change with it, the more exciting it is."

Journalism.co.uk is currently running a series of articles about journalism in New York: watch out for the tag 'JournalismNY' for a range of features. Articles featuring eminent online thinkers and developers will also be tagged 'Online theorists'.

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