Google Journalism, or Joogalism

The Saturday blight that is Julie Birchill’s holidays has hit, so I am forced to read Anne Kapf on Unconditional Love. A clear example of what you might call Google Journalism (or Joogalism, if you’re on a contractionist tip.) Granted, I can’t remember the last time I wrote anything without popping by Google at least once, but compare and contrast the first two thirds of Kapf’s piece with a quick Googling: “unconditional love”.

In the dim and distant past, this sort of fact-packed opinion piece would have oozed diligent research, or at least implied no small effort on the part of an uncredited lackey who spent a day trawling the archives. Nowadays, one tends to think, ‘Lazy sod, that was five minutes on the interweb!’ This probably means that facts will stop appearing in newspapers by 2020. Or something.

Posted at 11am on 07/12/02 by Jack Mottram to the web category.
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