The assignment questions were, "Does Google's mission statement represent a better definition of journalism?" and "How can technology be used to improve the quality of journalism?" The first question doesn't ask, "Is Google a journalistic institution?", but that was how the question was often interpreted. In a narrower sense, the question is simply whether Google's mission statement could serve as a substitute for the Committee of Concerned Journalists' statement of purpose. Google wants to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The Committee of Concerned Journalists want to "provide citizens with accurate and reliable information they need to function in a free society."

On the surface, these two statements are similar, except for one important distinction. Google's mission is to make all the world's information accessible and usable, whereas CCJ's statement of purpose focuses on supplying accurate and reliable information that citizens need.

While this distinction was not explicity expressed in any of the papers, quite a few of you wrote about the related question of whether Google could fulfill its role as a filter as reliably and meaningfully as an editor in a more traditional role could. Some saw the automated algorithmic approach used by Google as a way to counter natural human bias and error. Others expressed concern that Google's approach relied too heavily on popularity as a measure of reliability.

This is a fundamental question. Proponents of the semantic web envision an increasing role for computer technology in analyzing, sorting and filtering information as well as making inferences based upon the meaning of the document. To what degree can technology replace the judgement of a human editor? The underlying idea behind PageRank isn't really removing people from the equation - rather, it's a technological process for aggregating the collective judgement of thousands or millions of individuals based upon where their sites link and which links they click on when searching. On a basic level, it's a technological exploitation of the "wisdom of crowds", an effort based upon the idea that collectively people make better decisions and show better judgement than they do when acting alone.

A human editor brings human judgement (and the potential for human bias and errors). Automated systems are an alternative, but they do not remove the role of human judgement - it is just captured and utilized in a different way. This was sometimes criticized as ranking pages by "popularity". One concern about this technique is that it seems to create an environment where readers only pursue the most popular news items, and thereby miss those news items that contain relevant information that they need but that may not be as interesting as the latest Britney Spears rehab story. Another criticism is that it tends to promote fringe ideas - things like conspiracy theories and such. The underlying question is whether Google's method of weighting search results toward sites/pages that are linked to more often is a valid approach.

Another common theme was that Google represented a distribution medium rather than a content provider. Newspapers are a distribution medium, too, and journalism is one form of content that newspapers transmit (in addition to coupons, sports "news", advertising, op-ed, and so on). Advertisers pay for distribution and access to an audience. Journalism is a component of the overall newspaper offering - but what's interesting to me is the question of what happens to journalism when it gets "disaggregated" from the medium(to borrow a term from Chris Schroeder) because the business model seems to be linked to the distribution model rather than the content? When McClatchy provides content to Yahoo, they seem to be settling into a role of a content provider. News Corp. does not seem satisfied with this state of affairs, so it has made efforts to own the distribution platform as well (DirecTV). Are both strategies viable? Is one better than the other?

This also seems to split the journalistic role into two spheres - the first is the filtering role of the editor, and the second is the fact gathering and reporting role of the journalist. Of course, it is notoriously difficult to define exactly what news is. What is it, exactly, that a reporter is doing during the newsgathering process? Journalists do, sometimes, uncover hitherto unknown facts, but much of what journalists cover and report on are facts that come from somewhere else (government data, press conferences, press releases, and so on). The value-added is that they sort through them, check them for veracity and filter and priortize the news. While there does seem to be a difference between what Google is doing and what a reporter does, it is actually quite difficult to articulate it with any clarity.

Google's willingness to filter search results in China points to a more troubling question. Can you imagine the New York Times publishing a censured newspaper in China? Would it taint their reputation? One perspective is that Google isn't really a journalistic institution because they do not adhere to journalistic standards and ethics. It's much less an issue of how they present content, or whether they produce content vs. aggregate it.

Several of you pointed out that what Google's mission statement did reflect was at least part of the overall journalistic mission and that journalists would be well-served by understanding that "technology matters" and focus more on presenting information in useful ways. A few said that Google helps to support the overall journalistic mission by making it easier for consumers to check information ourselves, or to find alternative sources. Also, journalists themselves could use the Internet to connect with their readers and to establish a dialogue with them so that they could better understand their needs.

My opinion? I think that combining the two statements would be a great step forward. Perhaps it would be something like this: "To make accurate, reliable and useful information universally accessible."