New! Listen to host Mike Stephen and Justin Kerr discuss severance from Google and local journalism issues on the December 9, 2023, "Outside the Loop" show on WGN Radio: Click here to listen in.
One of our most challenging and significant platform overhaul tasks has been on my to do list for a long time: severing our relationship with Google.
This has been percolating for years, as Google transformed from a company providing useful services with integrity (and following an official corporate motto of “Don’t be evil”) into a monopolistic giant that exploits every advantage it can get away with in the interest of profit, no matter who gets harmed.
Google’s abandonment of “Don’t be evil” parallels the ways they’ve turned to harming not only local news publishers like the McKinley Park News, but also the news industry, the practice of journalism and users across the Internet.
Google is incompatible with a news outlet that places a value on independence in publishing and reader trust. Indeed, its general interests are inimical to news publishers like the McKinley Park News, for the following reasons:
- Google profits from knowingly publishing misinformation that puts working journalists in harm’s way.
One recent example is YouTube’s decision to allow 2020 election misinformation. As a journalist and news publisher, there is no ethical propriety to working with Google.
- Google endangers the privacy and security of our readers when we integrate its services.
Google’s like a pusher offering free drugs to websites, except, instead of drugs, it peddles complimentary services that embed into a website: from ad networks to analytics tracking.
However, there’s a price for these “free” services, in particular your privacy: Google is an advertising surveillance company, gleaning everything it can from you to then leverage, for profit, into an unregulated consumer data marketplace. Every integrated Google service phones home to track you in ways you certainly don’t want and likely didn’t know about, and some, like Google’s embedded advertising, regularly expose users to malware and other harms.
Your news should not spy on you. If our purpose is to serve our readers, then we cannot serve them up for exploitation to a company like Google.
- We want to neither rely upon nor assist a direct (and unfair) competitor like Google.
Google is a primary competitor for advertising revenue, which is the No. 1 source of revenue for news outlets, historically, and is critical for the success of our local news enterprise, according to analysis we’ve conducted with the help of our Sustainability Audit from LION Publishers and the Metro Media Lab at Northwestern University’s Medill School.
But Google doesn’t merely compete with us: It leverages its position as a massive and pervasive technology company to unfairly control all ends of the online advertising marketplace (and too many other areas of the Internet). The U.S. Justice Department is pursuing multiple lawsuits against Google’s anti-competitive practices that violate anti-trust laws, and we hope this uncontrollable, gargantuan business will be broken up, as it should be. The news industry would certainly benefit from a level playing field (advertisers, too).
- Never work with a thief is a best business practice, especially a thief that has stolen from you.
Google is among the many entities now peddling “artificial intelligence” (AI) services that not only directly compete against us, but that are built from content and expertise stolen from us to inform the Large Language Models (LLMs) that power AI, despite implicit and expressed prohibitions in our Terms of Service.
This theft fundamentally undermines the McKinley Park News, our ability to operate a local news enterprise and my livelihood as a local news journalist: No one will click over to the McKinley Park News, because the AI is providing the full McKinley Park answer … despite basing this answer on expertise and information stolen from our local news publication.
Indeed, this is but one of the many ways that Google makes money off the work of news publishers, but offers no remuneration. Larcenous Google and too many others have shown they have no interest in supporting local news, only what they’re able to steal from us.
So what does it mean to sever our relationship with Google? In addition to removing Google’s services from our website, we’re also no longer using Google’s back-end services — including Gmail and their office suite — for our operations.
A Continuing Purge
There are a couple exceptions: You may see occasional embedded YouTube videos in some content items, like a third-party event listing where a band has provided a video. (Use a script blocker like uBlock Origin to tune this if concerned; you should be using a script blocker in your web browser anyway.)
As an unfunded start-up, we’ll also continue to smear promotional links and marketing messages into every free channel, which includes social media of similar questionable ethical provenance. However, 100 percent of our real content – and interaction – will solely be available on the McKinley Park News.
Alternatives to Google
To help our readers understand the work we’ve undertaken to break from Google, and for fellow independent publishers to consider alternatives, here’s a list of what we’re using instead of Google’s services:
Domain Name Registration
The hegemon of the .news top-level domain hierarchy had been Google, from which we registered our mckinleypark.news domain: A lack of choice for .news was a primary problem with severing our relationship. However, Google recently sold its domains business, allowing other domain name registrars to manage .news domain name services. We’ve now moved our domains to a high-quality, independent, industry-leading domain name registrar instead.
Website Analytics
We had been using the default Google Analytics for years, even though we pretty much stopped looking at it because its granular focus is of less value to our small operation. Also, the version of Google Analytics we had been using was replaced by a new one that requires extra work to integrate and learn.
We already have two in-built sources of live analytics to measure our traffic: stats in our web hosting account built from server logs and tracking of items in our content management system (CMS). These ended up being more useful for both our immediate evaluation of traffic and providing concrete numbers we could show to prospective sponsors and advertisers.
Indeed, they showed different results than Google Analytics: more traffic! Google Analytics’ undercount is presumably because of the growing number of people smartly using script blockers in their web browsers to protect their privacy and security.
We will leverage more precise software to understand our traffic and user behavior, but in a way that respects your privacy and security, and that delivers more accurate information than Google Analytics: The open-source Matomo software is already running within the McKinley Park News server, and we’re now engaged in connecting it to the website.
Maps
Interactive maps are incredibly useful for a local news website, and we must embed them using a third party as their source, because we could never afford to build or run this mapping technology ourselves.
We had been using embedded Google Maps to accompany many features on our website. Now, we’re using the open source-based and privacy-respecting OpenStreetMap service instead for things like event locations; our Maps page; premium content like Building Permits, Crime Reports and Notable Arrests; and embedded maps in news articles moving forward. (Old articles may still have old maps in them.)
Switching from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap has been straightforward, as the CMS software vendors we work with all support OpenStreetMap and its many features: It’s now a requirement for the website software we choose to use.
CAPTCHA
A “Completely Automated Public Turning test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” (or CAPTCHA) is a common website tool to ensure that humans — and not automated bots — are interacting with a website. CAPTCHAs tend to slow down spammers, too.
Google’s ReCaptcha service, and its evolutions, has been a popular way to implement CAPTCHA, including for the McKinley Park News. We’ve now removed Google’s CAPTCHA and replaced it with an internally served solution that doesn’t rely on code inserted by a third party. Like switching from Google Maps, our CMS made it easy to change our CAPTCHA.
We’ve used Google’s Gmail for years as a way to collect and manage emails from multiple accounts. We’re no longer doing this for the McKinley Park News.
Like just about all commodity web hosting environments, ours contains full-fledged email services and management tools limited solely by the capacity of our raw Internet infrastructure capabilities. This has always powered our email on the back end; now, we’ve switched to open-source email clients as well as the highly capable webmail and other email services already built into our hosting.
The reason for Gmail used to be its better interface, but now everyone else — including free, open-source software — has completely caught up.
Fonts and Software Libraries
Since the 2012 launch of the progenitor of the McKinley Park News, we’ve always focused on independence in publishing, especially a vendor-independent platform that’s highly portable, unencumbered by licensing and relying on no third parties for its core functionality and design.
Among Google’s many services are website font embedding and provision of software “libraries” that can be delivered — presumably faster — than on-server versions. However, because we wanted to remain independent, we never integrated these services, instead serving up our own font files and internally hosted software libraries. Now, I’m most grateful for this decision!
There may be other bits and bobs of Google floating about, but we’ve done our best to purge ourselves of Google, and will continue to do so. We’d also advocate within the journalism industry that ethical operations of a news outlet should include business and platform ethics, too, including consideration of the third parties with whom one chooses to work.
We Are Betrayed
Unfortunately, much of the journalism industry, its institutions and its supposed leaders have completely abandoned core ethical ideas like a duty to truth or even basic tenets like stealing is wrong: Medill, LION Publishers and too many others are engaged in AI support and training that teaches others how to steal from us, without any consideration of ethics or the harm this causes.
Too many journalism institutions don’t advocate for the common interests of the journalism industry or broaden their horizons beyond the cloistered concerns of the newsroom and “product development.” Yet they present journalism incubators and other programs that purport broad support for news business and enterprise … while avoiding sorely needed expertise in basic things like direct sales advertising, the lifeblood revenue of our industry.
Google News Initiative
Why in the world would these institutions ignore the obvious needs of and even act against the fundamental interests of the industry they purport to support?
The Google News Initiative (GNI) is an arm of Google that postures itself as a beneficent foundation, yet is a for-profit, opaque business arm that has never revealed its purpose, despite sloshing millions of dollars of free money into entities adjacent to the journalism industry: journalism schools, non-profits, industry associations, etc. Even the LION Publishers Sustainability Audit grant money we received originated from GNI.
Getting Its Money's Worth
I think Google’s getting its money’s worth: Journalism institutions are ignoring common-sense advocacy and even engaging in behavior that fundamentally undermines the journalism industry. They shunt away from obvious and beneficial actions that would truly support local news, but that might compete with Google’s interests or raise questions about the ethics of enabling and legitimizing such a harmful third party.
Journalism institutions like this are led by those more interested in punching their meal tickets than supporting our industry: grasping for more dangled GNI payoff money, scrabbling to the top of the AI exploitation pyramid before all the jobs are gone and ignoring the fundamental journalism ethics that make news valuable.
Ethics are Non-Negotiable
Or that’s how it seems to me, and I’d imagine others, too. A core legal requirement of non-profit institutions is to avoid conflicts of interest, such that even perceived conflicts of interest are transparently disclosed and addressed ... or at least they are by responsible organizations (and this is a five-alarm klaxon of seeming grift). But too many self-styled journalism institutions have put journalism ethics on the back burner, if they haven’t snuffed them out entirely.
Are my actions and advocacy quixotic? Perhaps. But for me, ethical action across all parts of news publishing is a full-stop requirement for practicing journalism. How could you trust my news if you can’t trust me otherwise? This is a lesson these journalism institutions need to re-learn and monstrosities like Google need to respect.
Strategic Business Decision
These changes (and this screed) have all taken a bit of time, but are now complete. I consider severance from Google to be a necessary and beneficial long-term strategic business decision, especially as misinformation continues its rampancy, privacy becomes more valuable and third party tech giants like Google continue their “enshittification” to the detriment of those who work with them.
I certainly appreciate your patience, dear reader, as we finish these tasks to get back to our regular news publishing: You’re realizing their benefits right now by not being surveilled by Google. Our work continues nonstop, and we look forward to sharing more McKinley Park neighborhood news with you.
All the best to you and yours this holiday season,
— Justin Kerr, Publisher
McKinley Park News
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