Google Bulletin

» see bulletin.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Bulletin surfaced in January 2018 the way Google things sometimes did back then, which is to say a reporter found it before the company announced it. Slate had the story, Google confirmed it, and what got confirmed was a phone app for writing something up about your own street and putting it on the web.

The examples Google gave were deliberately unglamorous: a reading at the local bookstore, or a street closed for two days. The pitch was that this class of information was real news to the people it affected and that nobody was ever going to staff a newsroom to cover it, so the tool should go to whoever was already standing there.

The mechanism was the interesting part. You did not need a blog of your own or an account with a publisher. Bulletin wrote your post straight to the open web as an indexable page, and Google talked about local newsrooms picking these up and running them with a byline credit to whoever filed it. That is a genuinely different answer to the local news collapse than an aggregator or a subscription paywall.

~ the case file ~

~ two cities ~

Nashville and Oakland were the pilot, and the pilot is where it stayed. There was a launch event in Nashville, where a Google spokesperson talked about partnering with local publishers, and there was a signup form behind an invitation. Beyond that almost nothing happened. The app was never marketed in any serious way, which several of the people writing about its death named as the obvious reason it went nowhere.

No user number was ever published, which by itself tells you the number. Bulletin did not fail against a competitor and it did not get killed to make room for something. It never reached the point of having anything to measure, which is a specific kind of Google death and not the usual one.

~ the long tail ~

On 26 September 2019 Google emailed the people who had signed up to say the app would stop being accessible in two weeks and that stories created on it would no longer be public. The final date was 22 November, when everything remaining was permanently deleted. The suggested alternative was Blogger, which was fourteen years old at that point and would itself have been a reasonable candidate for this list.

Bulletin was never available anywhere near me, and there was no version of this that reached Turkey. That is not a complaint, because the thing it was trying to fix does not have a working product anywhere. Neighborhood-scale information still has no home except a chat group nobody can search and nobody archives. Google built the tool that would have indexed it, ran it in two American cities for twenty months, and then deleted what people had already written on it.

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