Nov 29th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
I was looking around at some of the blog posts and news articles on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, including one at Compete about traffic flows on Cyber Monday, and as usual I wound up at Google News doing a search for the term Cyber Monday. What came up was a cluster of almost 700 articles with one from CNet at the top.
Directly underneath the story cluster, however, was a comment balloon, indicating that Google News had added a comment from someone involved in the story, as the site started doing earlier this year in an attempt to add balance to the news that it presents (a curiously journalistic approach for a search engine). The Cyber Monday comment was one of the first ones I’ve come across “in the wild,” so I took a snapshot of the page. As it turned out, there were actually three comments:
One comment is from the chief retail analyst at NPD Group, a research firm, a second is from the executive director at Shop.org — where they have put together a page with hundreds of Black Friday deals, and a third comment comes from a retail analyst at Forrester Research.
What purpose does this serve? I’m not sure. The NPD analyst is actually quoted in some of the retail stories I came across, but his comment on the Google News page is substantially longer than any of his quotes in news stories; does that add value? Perhaps. The Shop.org comment seems fairly blatantly promotional, which makes you wonder why Google bothered. And the Forrester comment — which is quite short — arguably adds something to the story, but not a huge amount.
Will many people read those comments? And if they do, will it add to their understanding of the story in a way that a simple quote in a news article wouldn’t? I wish I knew.
Oct 19th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Google announced something kind of cool: a Facebook app for Google News, which allows you to choose categories or feeds based on your own keywords, and then share those stories with others and see what stories your friends have shared. Okay, it’s not a cure for cancer, but I think it’s a pretty useful app as far as Facebook apps are concerned — although that’s not exactly a high bar to clear.
I share stories I come across through either a del.icio.us feed (which is on my blog in the sidebar) and/or my Google Reader shared items (which are also in the sidebar), but lots of people don’t use those things, and may never use them. Google’s Facebook app gives them another way to see what stories their friends think are interesting, and to share their own picks from the headlines.
It will be interesting to see whether Google — which is about as data-obsessed as its possible for a company to be — will come up with any cool numbers based on what people have shared.
Oct 4th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Thanks to my mesh pal Mike Masnick from Techdirt for pointing me towards a recent column by Jeremy Wagstaff of Loose Wire (and the Wall Street Journal) that I had been meaning to post about. In the column, entitled “The Future of News,” Jeremy writes about how it’s difficult to talk about the future of news without admitting that the idea of what we call “news” has changed, and is continuing to change. As he puts its:
“There is no news. Or at least there is no longer a traditional, established and establishment definition of what is news.
Instead we have information. Some of it moving very fast, so it looks like news.”
This is partly the result of technology, in that more and more people are connected to sources of information than they used to be, even if those sources of information are friends or family on the other end of a cellphone or an MSN conversation, or a news feed. But all those connections have also expanded the definition of news:
“True, if someone hits a tall building with an airliner, that’s news to all of us. The U.S. invades or leaves Iraq; that’s news. But the rest of the time, news is a slippery beast that means different things to different people.”
And as newspapers and media websites everywhere are discovering, the news — the stuff people are really interested in — isn’t always what we put on the front page, or even the second or third page. Sometimes it’s the quirky or human-interest stories that really grab people. And yet, we routinely denigrate those types of stories.
“What we’re seeing with the Internet is not a revolution against the values of old media; a revolution against the notion that it’s only us who can dictate what is news.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Read the whole column here.
Sep 11th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 6 Comments
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.
Sep 1st, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 3 Comments
A fascinating announcement from Google about an arrangement with four of the world’s major wire services that will see their content featured more prominently on Google News. As far as I can tell, this deal has one major loser: namely, the thousands of newspapers that use content from those services, and are now going to see that traffic disappear.
As I understand it, the arrangement between Google and Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, the British Press Association and Canadian Press will see the content from those wire services appear on Google News with the logo of the wire service prominently displayed, and Google has agreed to give the wires’ version of a story prominence over the thousands of versions of that story that appear on the websites of the various newspapers that are members of AP, AFP, etc.
This is potentially explosive, I think. Whenever I search for a news story in Google News, I get hundreds of identical versions of that story from newspapers that picked it up from Associated Press — and I may even click through to the first newspaper that has a copy. But if I can see the story from the wire service itself, before it was edited or shortened or changed, I would probably prefer that. The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss has more here.
And while a Google spokesman said the changes “will have little impact on news organizations that receive traffic directly from Google News,” a Reuters story on the deal noted that:
“Because of Google’s campaign to simultaneously reduce duplicate articles, the original wire service article is likely to be featured in Google News instead of versions of the same article from newspaper customers, sapping ad revenue to those newspapers.”
In a sense, the deal with Google News puts wire services such as Reuters and AP into competition with the newspapers that are its members and customers — and will only increase the pressure on newspapers (and there are a lot of them) that continue to rely on wire copy to fill both their virtual and their real pages. And this new development is particularly interesting given Google’s recent plan to allow newsmakers to comment on Google News stories.
Further reading:
Dan Gillmor’s thoughts are here. Steven Hodson has some reaction at WinExtra and James Robertson thinks that the newspaper business has to go back to the future. Elsewhere, Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests says this puts the lie to Google’s repeated protests that it doesn’t compete with newspapers, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch puts the announcement into context, and my friend Scott Karp provides some perspective at Publishing 2.0. Steve Boriss also has a post at The Future of News.
And a commenter on Lost Remote’s post sums it up thus:
“Damn. I pay a ton of money for AP rights every year, and while it’s primary for the audience hitting our home page, I see a huge number of hits to that content from google news users. Guess I can kiss those eyeballs goodbye.”
Indeed. Although William Hartnett of the Palm Beach Post notes that those eyeballs aren’t really worth much anyway.
