Google’s Amy Adams Harding: 5 Steps We Can Take To Win Back Trust In Journalism

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Communicate with your audience in an authoritative but authentic way. Let them know how much time and effort you put into the story if it’s an investigative piece. This also builds the credibility needed when the publication ultimately asks for subscription or contributions from their readers.

As a part of our series about “the 5 steps we can take to win back trust in journalism” I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Amy Adams Harding of Google.

Amy Adams Harding is the Director of Analytics, Revenue Optimization and News Consumer Insights at Google. Her team is responsible for the News Consumer Insights suite of tools (including NCI, Realtime Content Insights and the RCI Chrome Extension, News Tagging Guide, and the NCI Demo Site) as well as the NCI Shift program for publishers which helps news organizations of all sizes turn analytical insights into concrete actions to better their reader engagement and monetization opportunities.

Thank you so much for joining us. Before we dive in, our readers would love to ‘get to know you’ a bit better. Can you share with us the “backstory” about how you got started in your career?

My roots in media and analytics run deep. My first job out of college was at NBC in GE’s Financial Management Program. I then joined a small startup called DoubleClick in 1997 to establish their Sales Analytics team. After spending much of the early 2000s in the Bay Area start-up scene, I joined Google as part of the DoubleClick acquisition where I was the business lead for a brand new product called Google Consumer Surveys. This is where the data conversation with publishers started and led to what I do today with my team.

Do you have a favorite book that made a deep impact on your life? Can you share a story?

I have 3 kids, so most of my reading time now goes into parenting books. The book that has made the most impact on me lately is Untangled by Lisa Damour. It’s about the transitions that girls deal with as they move into being teenagers and young adults. My daughters are 14 and 11, so, needless to say, we’re in the thick of it. The book has helped me to apply a framework to this new (and very often, frustrating) stage in our lives. It has also helped me take things less personally — not every single eye roll is meant for me. And, like, omg, there are so many! I read it with a highlighter and then leave it out for my girls to page through when I’m pretending not to look. It has spawned some great discussions and even a few laughs with my wonderful teen and tween!

Can you share the most interesting story that occurred to you in the course of your career?

The word interesting can mean different things to different people. But one situation I found interesting, and one that ultimately shaped a lot of my work and opinions, happened to me while I was at a start-up called Pure Digital in the early 2000s. I was employee #14 and we had the patent on the technology to make single-use digital cameras and video cameras. Honestly, it wasn’t a great business model initially, but the technology was very cool. We noticed that the video cameras were not being returned to the stores for developing — customers loved being able to take and share video on our easy-to-use devices and they didn’t want to give up the cameras just to get a CD burned of their videos. This was in the days before smartphones, so we picked up on the trend and pivoted our entire company to create the Flip video camera. If you’re reading this and you’re over the age of 40, you’ll likely remember the Flip. It was a whole new category introduction that was premised on the idea of simplification. At the time, a common camcorder had about 17 buttons on average. The Flip stripped it down to the 4 you needed to shoot, record and share videos, and did away with the extraneous and distracting options. I didn’t know it then, but this idea of simplification would stick with me and is the central operating principle of the tools my team now creates at Google.

Can you share the most humorous mistake that you made when you first started? Can you share the lesson or take away you learned from it?

There are a few I can draw from, but I’d say the funniest one involved linguistics. I was in London in 1998 pitching a large British airline on the first ever global online ad buy. It was a monster deal and I was in front of all the top marketing brass at the airline. The goal was to use online ads to sell more tickets, which was a new idea way back then. I boldly predicted that the ad buy would be sure to fill more seats, but little did I know, I used a commonly known saying in the US that meant something completely different in the UK. I heard a gasp and knew–instantly–that I had said something wrong. I asked sheepishly if the word I had used meant the same thing as it did in America and my worst nightmare was confirmed.

My day to day contact then burst out laughing and the room erupted. I was still mortified but I was so relieved! In the end I closed the deal and landed some global press, as it was a huge milestone in the online ad market at that point. I learned to perhaps play it safer when using jargon and also not to sweat that kind of earnest mistake. It’s no fun to work with someone who takes herself too seriously! And, the client never forgot me…the next time they flew me over to London for meetings they even upgraded me to first class!

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?

With a wide array of data at my disposal, I have the privilege of working across the Google News Initiative (GNI) to help publishers go beyond surface-level information and glean deep insights from audience analytics and business patterns.

My primary mission is working with publishers to help them create sustainability in their businesses. But, what I’ve found over the last decade of working with news publishers and data, is that sometimes less is more. Publishers today have an incredible amount of data available to them. The key is to know which metrics can help them drive their businesses and what data is simply noise.

Based on engagements with our news publisher partners, the GNI saw this need for simplification up close. So we worked with these partners to create the news-specific data tools we now offer.. To date, we’ve launched a suite of 5 free tools that help news publications turn data into actionable business recommendations. This serves a wide variety of news outlets from single-employee startups to global media companies.

Three years ago, we introduced News Consumer Insights (NCI), our audience development tool built on top of Google Analytics to help publishers make data-driven business decisions. Next, we added Realtime Content Insights (RCI) to help journalists make data-driven editorial decisions informed by what’s popular on their site and what’s trending on the web.

Since the initial launch, we’ve revamped both tools with greater insights and more personalized recommendations, and we created a Chrome Extension for RCI to make it easier to see on-page analytics. In order to help publishers decide what to tag, we created News Tagging Guide which actually creates the snippets of code a publisher needs to generate more salient Google Analytics metrics. And, we created the NCI Demo Site to bring it all together in a visual format to allow publishers to see our recommendations as they learn about how they can optimize their businesses. A picture is worth a thousand words in this case!

What advice would you give to your colleagues in the industry, to thrive and not “burnout”?

It sounds trite, but they say if you love what you do you never work a day in your life. So, I try to concentrate on leaning into the work I love the most and delegate or outsource some of the work that isn’t in my sweet spot when possible. Also, I’ve assembled my team like puzzle pieces. We work on things that are interlocking, but we’re all able to dig deeper into areas that interest us more. We collaborate with different members of our team on different projects so that we can interact with more people and learn from each other. Each person has projects they lead on and projects where they play a more supportive role. And, we’re all in different personal situations during this pandemic, so I’ve seen a great deal of assistance and coverage being offered from one person to the next when a life situation demanded it. It’s been so affirming to me to see how this team has operated, and I’m truly grateful for the people I get to work with everyday.

Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now shift to the main parts of our interview. According to this Gallup poll 45% of Americans trust the mass media. As an insider, are there 5 things that editors and newsrooms can do to increase the levels of trust? Can you give some examples?

  1. Personalize and humanize your journalists. I love the trend of the mini-bio at the end of a story. Learning where else the writer has worked gives me perspective on their background and tells me a bit more about their particular lens. Perhaps putting those bios up top makes sense to give them more prominence. The emergence of Substack and other journalist-specific mediums underscores the connection that can be built between journalists and readers. Connection builds trust.
  2. Be true to your publication’s POV, but be upfront with any bias the journalist or publication might have. Don’t be afraid to mention counter-points. The Google News App has a tab to surface other viewpoints on stories in order to present balanced coverage of an event or topic for just this reason.
  3. Know your data and help your audience parse and understand it. For example, in the question you cite “45% of Americans”. I’d say that number hides a lot of important information and nuance. It turns out that the average obfuscates the real trend–that the issues with trust are largely with younger adults who have grown up in a context of partisan media and “fake news.”
  4. Communicate with your audience in an authoritative but authentic way. Let them know how much time and effort you put into the story if it’s an investigative piece. This also builds the credibility needed when the publication ultimately asks for subscription or contributions from their readers.
  5. Show your work, be truthful and transparent with source material and give credit to others where due.

As you know, since 2016, the term ‘fake news” has entered common usage. Do you think this new awareness has made a change in the day-to-day process of how journalists craft stories? Can you give some examples?

I think the answer to this question depends on what type of journalist or publication you are or work for. I imagine that the acceptance of fake news as part of media has allowed many less reputable organizations to scale in a way they could not have previously. This has likely made more reputable organizations, the ones that place a premium on truth telling, struggle to attract and retain readers that now are shared with more sensationalist headlines and news. Attention has become incredibly fragmented across so many different media platforms. Newsrooms and journalists are having to produce content across this spectrum, which takes valuable time and resources.

Can you share your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started” and why? Please share a story or an example for each.

  1. Take risks. It’s can be hard to do when you’re just starting out, but it’s an important skill to learn–both the taking risk part and the results (good or bad) part
  2. Fail up when you can. Start the positioning early when you see things start to slide in the wrong direction!
  3. If you don’t like the people you work with, change your job. The people are so important. Most of my career regrets fall into this category!
  4. Be kind. You can still be tough. The two are not mutually exclusive, but you never know when someone might need a bit of kindness to see them through whatever they’re dealing with on the inside.
  5. Seek out a mentor, especially if you’re in a bigger company. Mentorship is earned, not asked for, so pay attention to opportunities to be helpful in ways that are above and beyond your job description and take them when you can!

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

It’s too hard to logistically publish quality news right now for many smaller publications. The technical hurdles can be overwhelming and the resources too expensive. I would love to see an internship program that combines up-and-coming dev talent (think high school and early college) with local news entities. The developers could cut their teeth on real content with real publications and the local news entities would get some of the dev hours they need to pay down the technical debt that many of them have. It might also breed interest in news publishing in this younger cohort and germinate a new generation of technical talent that devotes itself to the news industry in the future.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

You can follow the Google News Initiative on Twitter and LinkedIn. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn as well.

Thank you so much for your time you spent on this. We greatly appreciate it, and wish you continued success!


Google’s Amy Adams Harding: 5 Steps We Can Take To Win Back Trust In Journalism was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.