Google Reader is Dying: Does Anyone Care But Us? [Opinion]

On Thursday, Wired brought some insight into why Google decided to shut down Google Reader for good on July 1, and it all boils down to this: News consumption habits are shifting. Except perhaps for a small but vocal portion of Google's user-base.

In an interview with Richard Gringras, the Senior Director of News and Social Products at Google, Wired writer Christina Bonnington got a pretty good explanation for why Google would ever abandon Reader (and the readers who read it). According to Gringras, the ways people get their news is changing along with the ever more sophisticated, mobile technology we use daily. So Google is shifting away from Reader and towards new avenues in order to better help us get our current events.

That is, Reader just not used as much as it used to be - and for a company that trades in knowing what we want to know and how we get it, Reader is therefore useless.

"As a culture we have moved into a realm where the consumption of news is a near-constant process," said Gringras to Wired. "Users with smartphones and tablets are consuming news in bits and bites throughout the course of the day - replacing the old standard behaviors of news consumption over breakfast along with a leisurely read at the end of the day."

Instead of sitting down and reading through all the news that's fit to consume (and much that isn't), Google sees people turning to social media for news that is specifically relevant to them, meanwhile checking the live tiles on their phones every so often to see what's up in their world.

So Google is pushing two services that tailor to those reading habits: Google Plus and Google Now. With Google Now, the company is trying to automatically deliver news that applies to you, by taking variables like your location and the time of day into consideration, as well as learning what news subjects you prefer to read. For the "leisurely read at the end of the day" part of our news habits, there's Google+, which Google has been pushing as the one-and-only social media news and information source for a while now, with varied success.

Yes, Google is right about shifting news reading habits. According to the most recent survey from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, released in September 2012, newspaper consumption, radio news, and TV news are all in a nose-dive, compared to people getting their news online or through mobile devices. And, as the most recent Pew release on Wednesday showed, smartphone ownership is rapidly on the ascent.

But you can read RSS feeds on mobile devices, and anyway, Reader isn't a newspaper. But it does function as one for people who really care about the news. And those people - like Wired's Christina "Yes, some people are glued to their readers constantly. (Guilty!)" Bonnington - are often the ones that write the news, and are exactly the people who are most upset about Google's impending execution of Reader. (Does anyone else care?)

Simply put, Google's replacements aren't good enough - not to suit our very specific needs - not only to consume, but to exhume news from the deepest reaches and tiniest corners of the internet.

Automatically getting news or turning to your social network just won't work for us - the news-obsessed and/or the news writers. Regarding Google's Now and Plus replacement idea, Gizmodo's Peter Ha rightly observed, "it's one thing to know when I might want to read the news, but it's another thing to glean what I might want to read at that time." Google Now can't anticipate Ha's particular subjects of interest because first, AI recommendations are pretty sloppy, and second, in this case the "user" might be interested in anything.

But, of course, that's because Ha, Bonnington, and all of us in this soon-to-be accursed tribe of intense news consumers don't read just what we want to read. We try to read everything that we need to read. And that function, sadly, is not something that Google, nor any single news venture, seems to be able to profitably carry out.