Real-life experience with the new Google News
Update:
Associated Press spokesman Paul Colford emailed me about this post, and said that “only a tiny fraction” of the content that the newswire shares with aggregators such as Google and Yahoo comes from its member papers. Here is his comment in full:
“AP’s state wires, which include member content, are not licensed to Google and other online aggregators.
As a result, only a tiny fraction of the national and international stories sold by AP to aggregators originated with members of the cooperative – typically scoops credited to the members.
Except for this tiny fraction, the stories sold to Google and others are original AP reports by agency staffers.”
Colford also said that the Nashua Telegraph yearbook story described in the post below moved on the AP wire with a tagline that gave credit to the newspaper (although I didn’t see any such credit on the Google News version).
Original post:
I got a comment on one of my posts today from Damon Kiesow, the managing editor of the Nashua Telegraph, and I thought it was worth highlighting here because he talks about a real-world example of what the new Google “hosted news” deal with Associated Press is like for newspapers such as his.
According to Damon, his paper wrote an offbeat story about a girl and her problems getting a picture into her high-school yearbook, and Associated Press picked it up — and now is ranked as the top source. Here’s his comment:
Our first experience with the new AP/Google partnership:
The yearbook story was an offbeat piece that was picked up by the national wire. So, instead of Google giving our version (NashuaTelegraph.com) top prominence - the AP/Google page gets the traffic.
As Damon points out, even the other newspapers that picked up the wire story — such as Boston.com — are given preferential treatment in Google News, and the original Nashua Telegraph story comes up at the bottom of the search results. But there’s a silver lining, says Damon:
“Despite our angst at this, we have the last laugh as Fark.com ended up pointing at our version, driving 40 - 50k pageviews to that one story this morning.”
Welcome to the ever-changing world of Google-driven news. Steve Yelvington has some worthwhile perspective on the Google AP deal here.
Related posts:
(On Sep 11th, 2007 at 3:03 am)
One key point that needs to be made is that the AP and Nashua Telegraph articles are actually quite different. AP rewrites and genericizes for a huge audience, rather than just people in Nashua. Take a look at the original articles - the Nashua one doesn’t get to the point until the fourth graf, and that’s not going to show up on a Google search. The original also has a lot of detail about the decision, the legal background, school photos and a lot of other stuff that is interesting … but only if you live in Nashua.
If newspapers want to devote staff and time to genercizing their articles for national and international audiences, well then maybe they have a point. Otherwise the AP has its place.
(On Sep 11th, 2007 at 7:49 am)
FYI - we ended up with 40,749 refers from Fark yestrday and 74 from Google to the yearbook story.
It does sort of put things in perspective.
Damon
(On Sep 11th, 2007 at 9:53 am)
I wonder how much of that is a result of Nashua Telegraph being low on Google juice. That being said, I’ve always found Google News’ top picks for stories odd.
(On Sep 11th, 2007 at 11:09 am)
That’s a fair point, M Wendling.
And Craig, I think you are probably right about the role that overall Google juice plays as well.
(On Sep 11th, 2007 at 7:32 am)
This is a manifestation of something I was writing about back in, lordy, July 2004: Google News *penalises* the originator of a story (www.charlesarthur.com/blog/?p=43)
If anyone else picks up a story and rewrites it, their page is more “recent” - so, GNews reckons, “newsier”. Even if the “new” page has fewer facts or adds no new information.
The way around that is to change something, anything in the old page - even a correction of a spelling (or introduced error) will make the page “newer”. Of course, nobody would ever do that just to be the top source on GNews… would they?
This AP deal though sounds like poison for sites that aren’t lucky enough to get a Fark link..
(On Sep 11th, 2007 at 7:38 pm)
I appreciate Paul’s comments in the update (above) but I find the answer somewhat off the mark.
Adding a tagline with our URL (which our local bureau ALWAYS does) is about providing credit - which is a totally analog/print concept.
Creating a system by which AP/Google provide SEO that highlights originators of original content is a digital/online concept.
As well - the dilemma for newspapers includes the state/region wires which are much more of a daily concern for us than the national wire that Google hosted news provides.
I talked about this in my blog:
http://blogs.nashuatelegraph.com/web_notes/2007/09/13/let_the_fomenting_begin